Software Defined Mobile Networks (SDMN)

10Mobile Network Function and Service Delivery Virtualization and Orchestration

Peter Bosch,¹ Alessandro Duminuco,¹ Jeff Napper,¹ Louis (Sam) Samuel,² and Paul Polakos³

¹ Cisco Systems, Aalsmeer, The Netherlands

² Cisco Systems, Middlesex, UK

³ Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA, USA

10.1 Introduction

The concept of virtualization in telecommunications is not new. Ever since the need for the testing of telecommunication functions appeared, there had to be some means of testing a function either in a simulated environment or simulating the function itself to see if modifications and evolutions of the functions were viable prior to deployment. In either case, virtualization has gained ground as the potency of computation and storage has increased with every evolution of processors and storage. This has led to the point in telecommunications where network functions that were once considered only suitable to be run on bespoke hardware because of various limitations are now potential applications that can be run on common off-the-shelf processing. The idea of orchestration in telecoms is also not a new one. Orchestration in essence is the intelligent automation of repetitive processes whether for business or engineering.

Modern telecommunication networks have evolved over many decades. The evolution has usually meant that newer portions of the network have to coexist with older portions of the network. The resulting heterogeneity naturally led to increased network complexity. What this ...