Orchestrating Softwarized Networks with a Marketplace Approach

In the last years, network softwarization is gaining increasing popularity since it allows to achieve dinamicity and flexibility in network management, stimulating a lot of interest by both academia and industry. Cloud computing paradigm together with the new networking paradigms of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are supporting this evolution, by providing network services as single Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or chains of them. The main problem is scalability of both infrastructure and management. In fact, in order to support the SDN/NFV paradigm, the Telco Operator should deploy huge data centers, which have to be geographically distributed to guarantee low latencies to time-constrained flows, and implement complex orchestration policies. To this purpose, this paper proposes to extend the SDN/NFV framework with a marketplace where Telco Operator customers behave as third-party sellers with their hardware and software resources providing VNF as a service (VNFaaS), so helping the Telco Operator in providing network services in an efficient and scalable way.