Unified metamodel for orchestrating different domains in SDI

Abstract

Automation of business processes/operational workflows is an urgent issue for network service providers of today and Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) has emerged as a key enabler for software-based automated operation of various infrastructure domains. The “model-driven” nature of SDI sheds light on the significance of a solid metamodel, which provides a basic abstraction commonly observed in various application/infrastructure domains. We posit that, however, lacking such a simple unified metamodel for SDI today is the barrier preventing broad adoption of the SDI by network service providers. In this paper, we propose a metamodel for SDI management and orchestration. Our framework is extremely simple but sufficiently expressive to be able describe various application/infrastructure domains in SDI. It also provides loose coupling between these domains, allowing each domain to have a domain-specific view while maintaining a unified global view in the orchestrator. These properties make our proposal a promising candidate used in conjunction with the existing modeling languages toward the development of the unified SDI metamodel.