LightMANO: Converging NFV and SDN at the edges of the network

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has raised tremendous attention in the academic and industrial communities alike. The former have been attracted by the service centric orchestration challenges. The latter have found that, by decoupling network functions from the underling hardware, significant savings can be obtained by means of infrastructure homogenization and service automation. As opposed to the initial NFV solutions, which heavily relied on a centralized cloud model, the emerging Multi-access Edge Computing trend is calling for a distribution of computational capacity at the customers' sites. This change of paradigm could result in the deployment of tens of thousands or even millions of Points-of-Presence. In this article we discuss the fundamental challenges of deploying NFV in scattered environments, then we introduce the Light-MANO framework, a Multi-access Network Operating System converging SDN and NFV into a single lightweight platform for management and orchestration of network services over distributed NFV infrastructure. Finally, we report on a proof- of-concept implementation of LightMANO and on its evaluation.