NaaS Network Model and Termination Point Composition Best Practice R18.0.0 (IG1165)

TR 262 Management Platforms identified that the main challenge for Network as a Service (NaaS) operational domains is the current plethora of highly diverse and fragmented management systems that tightly couple network resources to the products offered by CSPs. This situation is compounded by a large and growing number of organizations defining networking standards in the form of interfaces and architectures. These organizations make independent technological choices, often disjoint from the main stream trends of the Cloud IT industry – which are increasingly dominant in OSS/BSS realization given the move to virtualization – and there is limited coordination of their work.

The consequences of these trends are that it is difficult for service providers to integrate vendor products based on standards from multiple technologies and standards organizations, the costs are exorbitant, and the solutions are brittle thus making product changes difficult.

The NaaS approach is to define self-contained NaaS operational domains that expose Technology Domain Neutral management capabilities as services via Open APIs to general purpose customer-facing IT systems.

This document explores the minimum design principles that are needed to allow component NaaS network connectivity services to be concatenated and composed into technology neutral end-to-end network connectivity services.