SDN applications - The intent-based Northbound Interface realisation for extended applications

Abstract

The Northbound Interface (NBI) plays a crucial role in promoting the adoption of SDN as it allows developers the freedom of developing their revenue-generating applications without being affected and constrained by the complexities of the underlying networks. To do so the NBI has to allow applications to express their requirements and constraints in their own application specific language, and the SDN controller to translate those requirements into SDN network specific language for provisioning network resources and services to satisfy the application requirements. The intent-based NBI is born from this consideration and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) provides principles and guidelines to build such an intent-based NBI. However, these principles do not lend themselves readily to the design and practical realization of an intent-based NBI for extended classes of business-like network applications. This paper introduces a solution and its initial implementation in the form of a novel architecture for realizing the intent-based NBI. The new solution exploits the modularized and reuse features of the micro services and service oriented architectures.