Network Function Chaining in DCs: The Unified Recurring Control Approach

The introduction of NFV in carrier-grade networks promises improved operations in terms of flexibility, efficiency, and manageability. NFV is an approach to combine network and compute virtualizations together. However, network and compute resource domains expose different virtualizations and programmable interfaces. In the UNIFY framework we introduced a joint compute and network virtualization and programming. In this paper we analyze how the joint virtualization and control of UNIFY can be applied to a Open Stack-Open Daylight Data Center. We show through an implementation, that the proposed unified recurring control has clear advantages compared to standard separated cloud and WAN orchestration approaches.