Hybrid Approach to Enabling Cross-Domain Service Orchestration over Heterogeneous Infrastructures

Efforts to lower the barriers for 5G uptake have brought forth accelerated innovation rates in a wide range of verticals. Consequently, the demands for 5G experimentation facilities have recently emerged from small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and 3rd party developers, requiring the abstraction of the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, platform, and related management and orchestration (MANO) systems, especially in multi-domain scenarios. This paper proposes a novel approach towards cross-domain service orchestration, which combines the flexibility of supporting different 5G Service Orchestrators (SOs) in various domains, while preserving compatibility through NetApps. The Cross-domain Service Orchestrator (CDSO) is based on ETSI's Open Source MANO (OSM), with a Requests Handler module on top, which acts as the main integration point to the different domains' 5G SOs and other custom systems that are northbound. This would facilitate the interworking among independently orchestrated domains in supporting multi-domain services. The EU Horizon 2020 project, 5GMediaHUB, is presented as a use case, together with a first implementation of the Requests Handler and corresponding integrations. Nonetheless, the proposed approach is vertical-agnostic and is foreseen to accelerate service innovation and digitalization in any industry by laying the foundations in terms of service management and interconnectivity.