...

The idea of using control loops to automatically (or autonomously) perform network management has been the subject of much research in the Network Management research community, see this paper for some background. However, it is only with the advent of ONAP that we have a platform that supports control loops for network management. Before ONAP, Control Loops have been deployed by hard-coding components together and hard coding logic into components. ONAP has taken a step forward towards automatic deployment of Control Loops by allowing parameterization of Control Loops that work on the premise that the Control Loops use a set of analytic, policy, and control components connected together in set ways.

The goal of the work here is to extend and enhance the current ONAP Control Loop support to provide a complete open-source framework for Control Loops. This will enhance the current support to provide TOSCA based Control Loop definition, development, deployment and run-time management. The participants that comprise a Control Loop and the metadata needed to link the participants together to create a Control Loop are specified in a standardized way using the OASIS TOSCA modelling language. The TOSCA description is then used to deploy and manage the Control Loops in the run time system.

1: Overall Architecture

The diagram below shows an overview of the architecture of TOSCA based Control Loop management.

...