Overview

Currently, control loops are VNF oriented, more specifically on VNF orchestration use cases. Here, we are examining how the control loop concept and implementation might be expanded so that it could be used to support PNF use cases.

Problem Statement

There are many PNF use cases that are inherently Control Loop "friendly" and can be described in terms of a Monitor→Analyse→Plan→Act autonomic (MAPE) control loop. Such loops are supported today in ONAP control loop for certain VNF orchestration use cases.

Some Proof of concepts have been implemented using PNFs in ONAP, but to date this has been achieved by "pretending" that the PNF is a VNF and adapting one of the existing Control Loop implementations such as the vCPE one to execute the logic of the PNF use case.

The problem statement is "to explicitly support PNFs, PNFs and PNF/VNF use cases in ONAP".

Business Requirement

There are a number of categories of  PNF related use cases that could be addressed by ONAP control loop support:

• Routine Management of PNF nodes, functions such as health checks and data collection
• Management of non real time aspects of the physical network itself
• Management of Network Slices (Could have PNF and VNF aspects)
• Management for specific domain problames

Participating Companies

Ericsson, ......

Goals

To bring in direct support for PNFs into ONAP control loops.

• Onboarding Definition and execution of PNF control loopsOnboarding of PNFs
• Triggering of control loops at PNF instantiation
• Support for PNFs in control loop components and events
• Support in DCAE for PNF focussed microservices
• Storage of data for PNF domains (in microservice? in A&AI?)
• Allow update of control loops at runtime

Contributions

Impacts

The following projects could be impacted.

SDC

A&AI

Modelling

Policy

CLAMP

Controllers

DCAE