In pursuit of a flexible, resource efficient and highperformant 5G infrastructure, many operators, vendors and research consortia are currently developing, testing and integrating their NFV platform with associated management and orchestration (MANO) functionality. The SONATA NFV platform follows a micro-service design, which involves a tight coupling between an SDK, monitoring and MANO functionality, targeting a secure and stable software foundation. This experience paper gives a thorough overview on the encountered challenges, insights and resulting learnings when implementing and integrating the SONATA Service Platform using a continuous integration and delivery DevOps methodology. This is the result of a strong cooperation between prominent equipment vendors, network operators, software companies and universities, providing a set of constructive recommendations in hope of catalysing the development and deployment of NFV platforms.

This paper presents a unique and new scenario where services are deployed across distributed domains, and each domain MANO (for VNF Management and Orchestration) requests and creates an on-demand Data Center slice to run those service elements. Whilst each domain has its own MANO, the MANOs are configured in a north-south way creating a hierarchy of service provision capabilities, rather than configured in the more common peer-to-peer approach. This approach works particularly well where each domain, from the mobile edge, to the core DC, can be managed independently of the others, but needs to be combined to form slices. End-to-end slices across the whole infrastructure provide a more effective resource management and also better support the customers' mobility requirements. The details of the architecture to support this scenario are described.

Abstract-This paper shows an innovative solution for distributing dynamic sensor data by using distributed caches. Our proposal is based on the concepts of service modularization and virtualization of network nodes made available by the NetServ hosting environment, which has been defined and implemented with the aim of extending the functions of the network nodes. Through a lab experiment involving tens of nodes, we have demonstrated a significant performance improvements in term of traffic saving and download time in comparison with a legacy, Internet-based, approach. Beyond this performance improvements, the proposed solution holds also functional improvements, in terms of dynamic deployment and easy integration with services making use of sensor data.

Abstract-Current proposals for combining service functions (SFs) do not address some critical management issues, such as the discovery of SF instances close to IP data paths. This information is crucial for deploying complex services both in large cloud networks, where SFs may be moved or replicated, and in the emerging fog/mobile edge computing systems. For this purpose, in this letter we propose the distributed off-path signaling protocol (OSP). We show the protocol functions and demonstrate its scalability and effectiveness by experimental results.