Comparison of Management and Orchestration Solutions for the 5G Era

5G is considered to be the technology that will accommodate the development and management of innovative services with stringent and diverse requirements from end users, calling for new business models from the industry. In this context, the development and efficient management of Network Services (NS) serving specific vertical industries and spanning across multiple administrative domains and heterogeneous infrastructures is challenging. The main challenges regard the efficient provision of NSs considering the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements per vertical industry along with the optimal usage of the allocated resources. Towards addressing these challenges, this paper details an innovative approach that we have developed for managing and orchestrating such NSs, called SONATA, and compare it with OSM and Cloudify, which are two of the most known open-source Management and Orchestration (MANO) frameworks. In addition to examining the supported orchestration mechanisms per MANO framework, an evaluation of main operational and functional KPIs is provided based on experimentation using a real testbed. The final aim is the identification of their strong and weak points, and the assessment of their suitability for serving diverse vertical industry needs, including of course the Internet of Things (IoT) service ecosystem.