Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

Abstract

Abstract-Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. By decoupling Network Functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in Operating Expenses (OPEX) and Capital Expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures, systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment. In this paper, after discussing NFV and its relationship with complementary fields of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud computing, we survey the state-of-the-art in NFV, and identify promising research directions in this area. We also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases and commercial products.

Challenges of future multimedia QoE monitoring for internet service providers

“…SDN and NFV are becoming more widespread [28], so that core network technologies are shifting towards virtualization. This makes it harder to identify the location in which quality should be monitored and assessed, when those traditional locations do not physically exist anymore.…”

100-Year History and Future of Network System Technologies in Japan

“…Network Function Virtualization (NFV) decouples network functions such as NAT, firewalls, load balancers, and so on from hardware appliances, and runs those functions as software on general-purpose servers [78]- [80] (Fig. 13).…”

SDQ: Enabling rapid QoE experimentation using Software Defined Networking

“…Software Defined Networking [16], through the decoupling of the control plane from the packet forwarding plane, allows network services such as load balancing and context aware resource allocation to be realised and automated as part of the service delivery chain [12]. This has led to a significant body of research investigating the use of SDN for QoE assessment and improvement including [11], [4].…”

“…However, when other devices share the same network, fluctuations can occur [7]. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has opened up a wealth of opportunities for improving QoE [12], [6]. This is achieved through a greater level of control and awareness of the behaviour of the underlying network.…”