X-MANO: An open-source platform for cross–domain management and orchestration

In the recent years several proprietary as well as open-source frameworks for network service orchestration have emerged. Similarly a significant body of literature has been produced investigating both the theoretical and practical aspects of network service orchestration. Nevertheless, currently available frameworks for network service orchestration are designed under the assumption that they can have full control over the resources being orchestrated. Such assumption does not hold any more when there is the need to pool both physical and virtual resources across different technological and administrative domains in order to deploy a service. In such a scenario, the different infrastructure providers may be reluctant to provide full access to their resources to a third party. In this paper we present X-MANO, a cross-domain network service orchestration framework. X-MANO is effectively deployment-agnostic and can be used in hierarchical, peer-to-peer and cascading (or recursive) configuration. We validate X-MANO through a proof-of-concept implementation over a multi-domain testbed. Finally, we release all the code under a permissive APACHE 2.0 license making it available to researchers and practitioners.