Abstract

A sophisticated and efficient network slicing architecture is needed to support the orchestration of network slices across multiple administrative domains. Such multi-domain architecture shall be agnostic of the underlying virtualization and network infrastructure technologies. Its objective is to extend the traditional orchestration, management and control capabilities by means of models and constructs in order to form a well-stitched composition of network slices. To facilitate such a composition of networking and compute/storage resources, this article introduces a management and orchestration architecture that incorporates Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) components to the basic 3GPP network slice management. The proposed architecture is broadly divided into four major strata, namely the Multi-domain Service Conductor Stratum, Domain-specific Fully- Fledged Orchestration Stratum, Sub-Domain MANO and Connectivity Stratum, and Logical Multi-domain Slice Instance stratum. Each of these strata is described in detail, providing the fundamental operational specifics for instantiating and managing the resulting federated network slices.