iCPN: Scalable Control Plane for the Network Service Automation System

Network virtualization has become a central aspect of 6G networks, which enable the composition of virtual network functions (VNFs), which can be instantiated at single or multiple sites to create highly flexible virtual network services. As a result of the increased complexity imposed on network components, network service automation systems (NSASs) are expected to become key technology enablers for 6G, whose implementation requirements on the control plane that are not met by current approaches based on a central message broker. We propose to meet these requirements by extending NSAS with an efficient and scalable control plane network based on information-centric networking (ICN), named iCPN, which uses names instead of addresses for information transmission and exploits in-network cache. We evaluated an iCPN prototype, demonstrating that it uses 50% less bandwidth and 15-36% less computation time than common alternatives.