Question 14/13 - Software-defined networking and service-aware networking of future networks
(Continuation of part of Q.21/13)
Motivation
The number of network services is continuously increasing, and they are becoming even more diverse not only in traditional properties such as bandwidth and delay, but also power consumption, mobility, delay tolerance, security and so on. Future Networks (FNs) are necessary to accommodate these services without drastic increases in easiness and costs of deployment and operation. At the same time, to make diverse service flourish, it is preferable for networks to provide easy methods to do evaluation and/or small-scale deployment of new services. Considering these requirements, Recommendation ITU-T Y.3001 identifies service awareness as one of the basic objectives of FNs to establish more effective way to tackle this conundrum.
Software Defined Networking (SDN), and network virtualization are among promising technologies because they enable network operators to divide networks into partitions to make problem size smaller, and to control their networks in unified, programmable manner. This realizes multiple isolated and flexible networks in order to support a broad range of network architectures, services, and users that do not interfere with others, which improves security. It is considered as one of the key technologies for FNs, and various SDOs have started to study these technologies in intensive manner, but overall framework that covers all telecom industry has not yet been defined. And there are other approaches to mitigate the diversity and complexity by e.g., introducing easily-manageable network architecture such as carefully-designed decentralization and autonomicity.
The Recommendations that specifies framework, service scenarios, requirements, and architecture of service-aware networking, in particular network virtualization and SDN technologies, fall under the responsibility of this question. As for SDN, the focus is on common part of SDN that is applicable to various networks, and its application to future networks.
Question
Study items to be considered, but not limited to:
Requirements for the architecture to manage and to operate exploding and diversifying services and supporting functions in particular SDN and network virtualization
Analysis of gaps between SDN, service-aware networking and existing standards and/or technologies
Approaches, architectures and mechanisms for highly-scalable, secure and distributed SDN and service-aware networking easy to control, operate and manage
Issues and solutions for migrating from current IP-based network to SDN and service-aware networking.
Tasks
Tasks include, but are not limited to:
Produce new Recommendations on requirements, functional architecture and mechanisms of generic SDN, its application to future networks, and service-aware networking
Produce Recommendations on general overview of service-aware networking.
Relationships
Recommendations:
Questions:
Study Groups:
Standardization bodies, fora and consortia:
