Abstract-Network Service Chaining (NSC) is a service deployment concept that promises increased flexibility and cost efficiency for future carrier networks. NSC has received considerable attention in the standardization and research communities lately. However, NSC is largely undefined in the peer-reviewed literature. In fact, a literature review reveals that the role of NSC enabling technologies is up for discussion, and so are the key research challenges lying ahead. This paper addresses these topics by motivating our research interest towards advanced dynamic NSC and detailing the main aspects to be considered in the context of carrier-grade telecommunication networks. We present design considerations and system requirements alongside use cases that illustrate the advantages of adopting NSC. We detail prominent research challenges during the typical lifecycle of a network service chain in an operational telecommunications network, including service chain description, programming, deployment, and debugging, and summarize our security considerations. We conclude this paper with an outlook on future work in this area.

No abstract

No abstract

Telecom providers struggle with low service flexibility, increasing complexity and related costs. Although "cloud" has been an active field of research, there is currently little integration between the vast networking assets and data centres of telecom providers. UNIFY considers the entire network, from home networks up to data centre, as a "unified production environment" supporting virtualization, programmability and automation and guarantee a high level of agility for network operations and for deploying new, secure and quality services, seamlessly instantiatable across the entire infrastructure. UNIFY focuses on the required enablers and will develop an automated, dynamic service creation platform, leveraging fine-granular service chaining. A service abstraction model and a proper service creation language and a global orchestrator, with novel optimization algorithms, will enable the automatic optimal placement of networking, computing and storage components across the infrastructure. New management technologies based on experience from DCs, called Service Provider DevOps, will be developed and integrated into the orchestration architecture to cope with the dynamicity of services. The applicability of a universal node based on commodity hardware will be evaluated in order to support both network functions and traditional data centre workloads, with an investigation of the need of hardware acceleration.