Common use of Virtual Infrastructures Clause in Contracts

Virtual Infrastructures. The Virtual Infrastructure information model describes the service for the provisioning and management of virtual network slices, which is implemented by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager component of the SDN controller (see Table 3). The information model specifies the entities composing a virtual network which can be handled as part of a cloud service offer. Depending on the request type, the level of detail in the request can specify topology constraints or even abstract optical capabilities (e.g. a WDM link with two wavelengths). In this case, the virtual infrastructure information model will be very similar to the DCN information model, but dealing with virtual resources rather than with physical ones. Moreover, the request may even specify virtual network functions to be traversed by some traffic flows described through classifiers. Otherwise, the request can describe a virtual network infrastructure using the higher level concepts which are currently in use in cloud services. For example, the Neutron component in OpenStack defines virtual resources like networks, subnets, ports, routers, interfaces, security groups and rule, metering labels. COSIGN offers a service to enable CRUD operations on this type of resources through the SDN application for Overlay-based network service virtualization (see Table 4). The REST APIs offered by this application at the SDN controller’s A-CPI are used for the interaction with the Neutron component of the cloud platform for the on-demand provisioning of overlay virtual networks.