Bi-directional Network and Application Interaction: Application Intents upon Abstracted Network Information (Invited Paper)

In the last years, progress in network automation has opened business opportunities for timely and robust deployment of third party applications and services on top of operator's networks. This promise is to be held with the support of virtualization, programma-bility, orchestration and slicing, which are novel capabilities being introduced gradually on operational telecom networks. Application and service requests range from on-demand deployment, run-time adaptation, information on deployment topology and network capabilities exposure in general. These operations rely on robust and fast interaction between applications and the infrastructure where they are being deployed. Applications place network technology agnostic service requests in a format that needs to be understood and processed by the infrastructure that in turn must guarantee the reliability of its response. The efficiency of this interaction requires the exposition of appropriate network information for the applications and services to adapt or refine their requests, avoiding thus a first level of failure. This paper investigates a way for applications and networks to interact so as to ensure the expected service quality.