Emulation-based Smoke Testing of NFV Orchestrators in Large Multi-PoP Environments

Management and orchestration (MANO) systems are the key components of future large-scale NFV environments. They will manage resources of hundreds or even thousands of NFV infrastructure installations, so called points of presence (PoP). Such scenarios need to be automatically tested during the development phase of a MANO system. This task becomes very challenging because large-scale NFV testbeds are hard to maintain, too expensive, or simply not available. In this paper, we present a multi-PoP NFV infrastructure emulation platform that enables automated, large-scale testing of MANO stacks. We show that our platform can easily emulate hundreds of PoPs on a single physical machine and reduces the setup time of a test PoP by a factor of 232 x compared to a DevStack-based test PoP installation. Further, we present a case study in which we test ETSI's Open Source MANO (OSM) against our proposed system to gain insights about OSM's behaviour in large-scale NFV deployments.