Software Networks, 2nd Edition

8Software Network Automation

Automation is the keyword of the new NFV and SDN network generation. Until now, automation has not been present in the world of networks, except in some specific cases such as failure diagnosis. For automation, a network autopilot is required. This autopilot must contain three main components. First, the orchestrator has to determine which virtual machine to use, chain and develop in the network. The second component is the virtual machine configurator, which is the SDN controller that has to set up virtual machines. The third component is the virtualized infrastructure manager that has to detect and diagnose the infrastructure’s virtual machines. These components are the MANO (Management and Orchestration) function mentioned in Chapter 4.

The main automation software has already been described in Chapter 4 on open source software. It is ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform). In this chapter, we will instead focus on the use of artificial intelligence tools to build automatisms in the different functions that need to be automated and to distribute this intelligence. Indeed, the first generation of autopilot is centralized, mainly because artificial intelligence tools work well in this context. Distributed artificial intelligence is more complex since it requires a great volume of knowledge of all aspects of the network. The streams of the knowledge plane can become very important compared to the network capacity, and the action sharing algorithms ...