Intent-based service management for heterogeneous software-defined infrastructure domains

One of the main challenges in delivering end-to-end service chains across multiple software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) domains is to achieve unified management and orchestration functions. A very critical aspect is the definition of an open, vendor-agnostic, and interoperable northbound interface (NBI) that should be as abstract as possible and decoupled from domain-specific data and control plane technologies. In this paper, we propose a reference architecture and an intent-based NBI for end-to-end service management across multiple technological domains. The general approach is tested in a heterogeneous OpenFlow/Internet-of-Things (IoT) SDN test bed, where the proposed solution is applied to a rather complex service provisioning scenario spanning three different technological domains: an IoT infrastructure deployment, a cloud-based data collection, processing, and publishing platform, and a transport domain over a geographic network interconnecting the IoT domain and the data center hosting the cloud services.