SDN-Managed Provisioning of Named Computing Services in Edge Infrastructures

Pushed by the challenging demands of fifth generation (5G) use cases and the recent advancements in virtualization technologies, edge network devices are rapidly evolving from simple forwarders to softwarized infrastructures augmented with computing and storage capabilities. Such a trend blurs the distinction between IT and telco domains and paves the way for the integrated management of network and computing resources. In this paper, we focus on the interplay of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Named Data Networking (NDN) paradigms as key drivers for the orchestration of computing services in softwarized edge infrastructures. We propose a new framework that brings out the best of the SDN centralized intelligence to take “smart” decisions and inject rules for service allocation (e.g., retrieve input data, execute a function over them), and the best of the adaptive NDN forwarding plane and its native in-network caching to request and deliver services by name. Within the framework, we devise a service allocation strategy that aims at selecting as an executor, among the potential candidates, the one which is able to guarantee the shortest service provisioning delay for each service request, while accounting for the network topology, the links status, and the available computing resources in the edge nodes. Performance evaluations testify to the superiority of our proposal against benchmarking solutions from the literature under different operation settings.