VNF Software Cost Modeling Based on Telecom Network

Abstract

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) extracts network functions, allowing software running on standardized compute nodes to install, control, and manipulate them. NFV integrates cloud and virtualization technologies to rapidly develop new network services while enhancing flexibility, scalability, and automation. The adoption and success of NFV are contingent on managing software costs and resources. It involves multiple conflicting objectives to be addressed, such as energy, licenses, resource migration, and resource cost. That makes it harder to implement resources and cost management. Thus, to address this problem, this article first module the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of software cost of VNF based on two crucial costs License Cost (LC) and Resources Cost (RC). LC is associated with software rights granted (and consumed) to the user. RC depends on the use of resources. The usage of resources determines the energy consumption by the VNF, which helps to estimate the Energy Cost (EC). After modeling TCO, we minimize the TCO by using the VNF resources sharing and consolidation technique. We proposed this technique by including LC and RC. Our evaluation results verify that considering RC, LC, and EC for VNF sharing minimizes the TCO with optimum resource utilization.