Unifying Cloud and Carrier Network: EU FP7 Project UNIFY

Abstract

Telecom providers struggle with low service flexibility, increasing complexity and related costs. Although "cloud" has been an active field of research, there is currently little integration between the vast networking assets and data centres of telecom providers. UNIFY considers the entire network, from home networks up to data centre, as a "unified production environment" supporting virtualization, programmability and automation and guarantee a high level of agility for network operations and for deploying new, secure and quality services, seamlessly instantiatable across the entire infrastructure. UNIFY focuses on the required enablers and will develop an automated, dynamic service creation platform, leveraging fine-granular service chaining. A service abstraction model and a proper service creation language and a global orchestrator, with novel optimization algorithms, will enable the automatic optimal placement of networking, computing and storage components across the infrastructure. New management technologies based on experience from DCs, called Service Provider DevOps, will be developed and integrated into the orchestration architecture to cope with the dynamicity of services. The applicability of a universal node based on commodity hardware will be evaluated in order to support both network functions and traditional data centre workloads, with an investigation of the need of hardware acceleration.