Fostering rapid, cross-domain service innovation in operator networks through Service Provider SDN

Software defined networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are new approaches to next generation network architecture for operator networks that have received much discussion in the research literature and in new forums organized to standardize their interfaces. While these approaches to network architecture are important, they only cover part of the problem. A fundamental property required from any next generation architecture is support for rapid, cross-domain service innovation. In this paper, we discuss Service Provider SDN (SP-SDN), an architectural approach to rapid service innovation based on exposure of functionality for cross-domain control at the service layer. The functionality is exposed through Web-style interfaces that feature abstractions crafted by suppressing detail irrelevant for the majority of the created services. The control spans mobile, fixed and cloud operator networks, allowing the rapid and flexible provisioning of services across all three domains. We compare this approach to SDN and NFV, and find that SP-SDN complements rather than competes with the two. We present two examples of prototype systems built with SP-SDN.