A Multi-Domain Multi-Technology SFC Control Plane Experiment: A UNIFYed Approach (original) (raw)

Service Function Chaining (SFC) Control Plane Components & Requirements

2016

This document describes requirements for conveying information between Service Function Chaining (SFC) control elements (including management components) and SFC functional elements. Also, this document identifies a set of control interfaces to interact with SFC- aware elements to establish, maintain or recover service function chains. This document does not specify protocols nor extensions to existing protocols. This document exclusively focuses on SFC deployments that are under the responsibility of a single administrative entity. Inter- domain considerations are out of scope.

Network Function Virtualization: A Survey

IEICE Transactions on Communications, 2017

The objectives of this survey are to provide an in-depth coverage of a few selected research papers that have made significant contributions to the development of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and to provide readers insights into the key advantages and disadvantages of NFV and Software Defined Networks (SDN) when compared to traditional networks. The research papers covered are classified into four categories: NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), Network Functions (NFs), Management And Network Orchestration (MANO), and service chaining. The NFVI papers describe "framework" software that implement common functions, such as dynamic scaling and load balancing, required by NF developers. Papers on NFs are classified as offering solutions for software switches or middleboxes. MANO papers covered in this survey are primarily on resource allocation (virtual network embedding), which is an orchestrator function. Finally, service chaining papers that offer examples and extensions are reviewed. Our conclusions are that with the current level of investment in NFV from cloud and Internet service providers, the promised cost savings are likely to be realized, though many challenges remain.

Management and orchestration challenges in network functions virtualization

IEEE Communications Magazine, 2016

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) continues to draw immense attention from researchers in both industry and academia. By decoupling Network Functions (NFs) from the physical equipment on which they run, NFV promises to reduce Capital Expenses (CAPEX) and Operating Expenses (OPEX), make networks more scalable and flexible, and lead to increased service agility. However, despite the unprecedented interest it has gained, there are still obstacles that must be overcome before NFV can advance to reality in industrial deployments, let alone delivering on the anticipated gains. While doing so, important challenges associated with network and function Management and Orchestration (MANO) need to be addressed. In this article, we introduce NFV and give an overview of the MANO framework that has been proposed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). We then present representative projects and vendor products that focus on MANO, and discuss their features and relationship with the framework. Finally, we identify open MANO challenges as well as opportunities for future research.

Hierarchical and Recursive NFV Service Platform for End-to-End Network Service Orchestration Across Multiple NFVI Domains

2018

The ETSI network function virtualisation (NFV) management and orchestration (MANO) architectural framework defines an NFV service platform composed of an NFV orchestrator and virtualised network function (VNFs) managers that are responsible to provide NFV network services. Network services can be defined as the joint instantiation of VNFs and the provisioning of required network connections between the different VNFs to jointly realise a more complex function (e.g. service function chaining). In general, it is assumed that a single service platform is governing the whole NFV infrastructure (NFVI) domain from the edge to the core of the network, composed of multiple edge computing and core DCs interconnected by heterogeneous optical access, metro and core transport networks. However, network operators will fragment their transport networks and DCs into multiple NFVI domains for scalability, administrative, or security issues. Each NFVI domain can be provided by different vendors relying on their own NFV service platforms or leveraging open source solutions such as SONATA, OSM, or ONAP. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical and recursive network service orchestration architecture to compose end-to-end network services by aggregating network services provided by per-domain NFV service platforms together with VNFs.

Network virtualization, control plane and service orchestration of the ICT STRAUSS project

2014 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), 2014

Emerging cloud applications such as real-time data backup, remote desktop, server clustering, etc. require not only more traffic being delivered between datacenters, but also dedicated and application-specific virtual optical network (VON) services to support each application's QoS and SLA level. On the other hand, another requirement is to support end-to-end network service provisioning across multiple VONs comprising different transport (e.g. Flexi-grid DWDM OCS, OPS, etc) and control plane technologies (e.g., centralized OpenFlow or distributed GMPLS). This paper presents the preliminary architecture of the network virtualization, control and orchestration layers proposed in the STRAUSS project.

Managing NFV using SDN and control theory

2016

Control theory and SDN (Software Defined Networking) are key components for NFV (Network Function Virtualization) deployment. However little has been done to use a control-theoretic approach for SDN and NFV management. In this paper, we describe a use case for NFV management using control theory and SDN. We use the management architecture of RINA (a clean-slate Recursive InterNetwork Architecture) to manage Virtual Network Function (VNF) instances over the GENI testbed. We deploy Snort, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) as the VNF. Our network topology has source and destination hosts, multiple IDSes, an Open vSwitch (OVS) and an OpenFlow controller. A distributed management application running on RINA measures the state of the VNF instances and communicates this information to a Proportional Integral (PI) controller, which then provides load balancing information to the OpenFlow controller. The latter controller in turn updates traffic flow forwarding rules on the OVS switch, thus balancing load across the VNF instances. This paper demonstrates the benefits of using such a controltheoretic load balancing approach and the RINA management architecture in virtualized environments for NFV management. It also illustrates that GENI can easily support a wide range of SDN and NFV related experiments.

"Integrated NFV/SDN Architecture -A Systematic Literature Review" Summarization and Extraction of NFV Technology

This miniature research paper summarizes and extracts the studies about Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) from the ACM published research paper "Integrated NFV/SDN Architectures: A Systematic Literature Review" -January 2018 by MICHAEL S. BONFIM, KELVIN L. DIAS, and STENIO F. L. FERNANDES, from the Universidad Federal de Pernambuco, applying the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method which uses practices to collect data, critically appraise previous research studies, and synthesizes it. While NFV technologies are defining the next move to the one-network hardware solution, through the virtualization of network functions, it's still at its early stages of development, researchers have been designing it unto different environments to address its reliability, performance and scalability. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) focuses on achieving a complete investigation review on its architecture, synthesizing its architecture design and identify areas for further improvements.

Network function virtualization enablement within SDN data plane

IEEE INFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, 2017

Software Defined Networking (SDN) can benefit a Network Function Virtualization solution by chaining a set of network functions (NF) to create a network service. Currently, control on NFs is isolated from the SDN, which creates routing inflexibility, flow imbalance and choke points in the network as the controller remains oblivious to the number, capacity and placement of NFs. Moreover, a NF may modify packets in the middle, which makes flow identification at a SDN switch challenging. In this paper, we postulate native NFs within the SDN data plane, where the same logical controller controls both network services and routing. This is enabled by extending SDN to support stateful flow handling based on higher layers in the packet beyond layers 2-4. As a result, NF instances can be chained on demand, directly on the data plane. We present an implementation of this architecture based on Open vSwitch, and show that it enables popular NFs effectively using detailed evaluation and comparison with other alternative solutions.