Driven by the growth of cloud and virtualization technologies, telecom services are under pressure to become increasingly dynamic. Cloud services can be instantiated in a matter of minutes on computing platforms, which can rapidly schedule and allocate virtualized physical resources. A similar flexibility to adapt to dynamic service requests remains a challenge with network resources. Recently, centralized controllers have been deployed in data center networks to adapt network connectivity to computational needs. However, due to the complexity and variety of carrier networking technologies, carrier networks have been slow to move towards centralized control. More recently, carriers are evolving to address network complexity by pushing for the disaggregation of network elements and the introduction of equipment with more control flexibility. Carriers require a new control paradigm to benefit from this new flexibility, which extends far beyond today's OpenFlow network controllers. The lack of a global network controller with a consistent network view slows down the development and deployment of the more dynamic network services required by extensive cloud technologies. To address the scaling requirements of the carrier environment, the envisioned network controller would be implemented as a distributed system. In this article, we describe a global network controller designed to function as a network operating system with multi-domain, multi-layer capabilities that will transform carrier-grade telecom services. We define the requirements for a carrier-grade network operating system (OS) and describe a prototype system (NetUNIX) that can control heterogeneous networks at large scale and ensure high service reliability. We highlight the advantages of the NetUNIX platform in the context of other open source platforms and illustrate the use of the NetUNIX platform with two use cases: a metro-distributed data center and 5G next-generation fronthaul.

中文翻译：

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网络操作系统：多域、多层网络的电信级SDN控制

在云和虚拟化技术发展的推动下，电信服务面临着变得越来越动态的压力。云服务可以在几分钟内在计算平台上实例化，可以快速调度和分配虚拟化的物理资源。适应动态服务请求的类似灵活性仍然是网络资源的挑战。最近，集中控制器已部署在数据中心网络中，以使网络连接适应计算需求。然而，由于运营商组网技术的复杂性和多样性，运营商网络向集中控制的方向发展缓慢。最近，运营商正在通过推动网络元素的分解和引入具有更大控制灵活性的设备来解决网络复杂性问题。运营商需要新的控制范式才能从这种新的灵活性中受益，这远远超出了当今的 OpenFlow 网络控制器。缺乏具有一致网络视图的全局网络控制器会减慢广泛云技术所需的更动态网络服务的开发和部署。为了满足运营商环境的扩展要求，设想的网络控制器将实现为分布式系统。在本文中，我们描述了一个全局网络控制器，其设计用作具有多域、多层功能的网络操作系统，将改变运营商级电信服务。我们定义了对运营商级网络操作系统（OS）的要求，并描述了一个原型系统（NetUNIX），该系统可以大规模控制异构网络并确保高服务可靠性。我们在其他开源平台的背景下突出了 NetUNIX 平台的优势，并通过两个用例说明了 NetUNIX 平台的使用：城域分布式数据中心和 5G 下一代前传。