Virtualization enables the sharing of a same wireless sensor network (WSN) by multiple applications. However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor networks (VWSN) raises new challenges such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that can certainly aid in tackling these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on top of commodity hardware. This article presents a case study on NFV based gateways for VWSNs. In the study, a VWSN gateway provider, operates and manages an NFV based infrastructure. We use two different brands of wireless sensors. The NFV infrastructure makes possible the dynamic, elastic and scalable deployment of gateway modules in this heterogeneous VWSN environment. The prototype built with Openstack as platform is described.
The standardization of Radio Access Network (RAN) in mobile networks has traditionally been led by 3GPP. However, the emergence of RAN slicing has introduced new aspects that fall outside 3GPP scope. Among them, network virtualization enables the particularization of multiple RAN behaviors over a common physical infrastructure. Using Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) that comprise customized radio functionalities, each virtualized RAN, denominated RAN slice, could meet its specific requirements. Although 3GPP specifies the description model to manage RAN slices, it can neither particularize…
Virtualization enables multiple applications to share the same wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN). However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor and actuator networks (VWSAN) raise new challenges, such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic, and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a paradigm emerging to help tackle these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on commodity hardware. This article presents NFV architecture for VWSAN gateways, in wh…
The shift towards a completely virtualized networking environment is triggered by the emergence of software defined networking and network function virtualization (NFV). Network service providers have unlocked immense capabilities by these technologies, which have enabled them to dynamically adapt to user needs by deploying their network services in real-time through generating Service Function Chain (SFCs). However, NFV still faces challenges that hinder its full potentials, including availability guarantees, network security, and other performance requirements. For this reason, the deploymen…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has recently received significant attention as an innovative way of deploying network services. By decoupling network functions from the physical equipment on which they run, NFV has been proposed as passage towards service agility, better time-to-market, and reduced Capital Expenses (CAPEX) and Operating Expenses (OPEX). One of the main selling points of NFV is its promise for better energy efficiency resulting from consolidation of resources as well as their more dynamic utilization. However, there are currently no studies or implementations which attach…
Autonomous management and orchestration (MANO) of virtualized resources and services, especially in large-scale Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environments, is a big challenge owing to the stringent delay and performance requirements expected of a variety of network services. The Quality-of-Decisions (QoD) of a Management and Orchestration (MANO) system depends on the quality and timeliness of the information received from the underlying monitoring system. The data generated by monitoring systems is a significant contributor to the network and processing load of MANO systems, impacting …
Network virtualization and softwarizing network functions are trends aiming at higher network efficiency, cost reduction and agility. They are driven by the evolution in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This shows that software will play an increasingly important role within telecommunication services, which were previously dominated by hardware appliances. Service providers can benefit from this, as it enables faster introduction of new telecom services, combined with an agile set of possibilities to optimize and fine-tune their operations. However,…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is considered one of the key technologies for the 5G mobile networks. In NFV, network functions are implemented in software components denominated Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) running on commodity hardware. In this paper, we propose an analytical model based on an open queuing network of G/G/m queues to model VNFs with single- or multi-tier designs, and chains of VNFs. Our model is flexible and generic enough to capture the behavior of such systems. We validate our model by simulation. Specifically, we validate it for an LTE virtualized Mobility Manage…
Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a new concept that has received the attention of both researchers and network providers. NFV decouples network functions from specialized hardware devices and virtualizes these network functions as software instances called virtualized network functions (VNFs). NFV leads to various benefits, including more flexibility, high resource utilization, and easy upgrades and maintenances. Despite recent works in this field, placement and chaining of VNFs need more attention. More specifically, some of the existing works have considered only the placement of VN…
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) developed Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Management and Orchestration (MANO) framework. Within that framework, NFV orchestrator (NFVO) and Virtualized Network Function (VNF) Manager (VNFM) functional blocks are responsible for managing the lifecycle of network services and their associated VNFs. However, they face significant scalability and performance challenges in large-scale and geo-distributed NFV systems. Their number and location have major implications for the number of VNFs that can be accommodated and also for the ove…
As mobile network users look forward to the connectivity speeds of 5G networks, service providers are facing challenges in complying with connectivity demands without substantial financial investments. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is introduced as a new methodology that offers a way out of this bottleneck. NFV is poised to change the core structure of telecommunications infrastructure to be more cost-efficient. In this paper, we introduce a Network Function Virtualization framework, and discuss the challenges and requirements of its use in mobile networks. In particular, an NFV framew…
Allocating resources to virtualized network functions and services to meet service level agreements is a challenging task for NFV management and orchestration systems. This becomes even more challenging when agile development methodologies, like DevOps, are applied. In such scenarios, management and orchestration systems are continuously facing new versions of functions and services which makes it hard to decide how much resources have to be allocated to them to provide the expected service performance. One solution for this problem is to support resource allocation decisions with performance …
The concept of a softwarized network leveraging technologies such as SDN and NFV comes with different merits such as decreased Operational Expenses (OPEX) and less dependency on underlying hardware components. With the amount of increased flexibility, reconfigurability and programmability attributed to future technologies (i.e. 5G and beyond), and towards the complete network virtualization and softwarization, a new set of requirements or parameters can be identified affecting the latency in a virtualized network. In this paper, we identify different latency requirements for a virtualized netw…
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) allows implantation of network functions to be independent of dedicated hardware devices. Any series of services can be represented by a service function chain which contains a set of virtualized network functions in a specified order. From the perspective of network performance optimization, the challenges of deploying service chain in network is twofold: 1) the location of placing virtualized network functions and resources allocation scheme; and 2) routing policy for traffic flow among different instances of network function. This article introduces se…
This paper proposes a framework for integrating data plane (DP) acceleration within the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) architecture. Data plane programming (DPP) proves to be beneficial for NFV environments, as it provides full packet forwarding flexibility through the use of self-designed algorithms. Additionally, DPP provides high-performance networking, as the DP can be configured to execute specific functions on dedicated hardware. We present an integration of the DP acceleration within the ETSI NFV architecture that leverages custom DP functions implemented in hardware switches us…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that turns hardware-dependent implementation of network functions (i.e., middleboxes) into software modules running on virtualized platforms, for significant cost reduction and ease of management. Such virtual network functions (VNFs) commonly constitute service chains, to provide network services that traffic flows need to go through. Efficient deployment of VNFs for network service provisioning is key to realize the NFV goals. Existing efforts on VNF placement mostly deal with offline or one-time placement, ignoring the fundamenta…
Middleboxes or network appliances like firewalls, proxies and WAN optimizers have become an integral part of today's ISP and enterprise networks. Middlebox functionalities are usually deployed on expensive and proprietary hardware that require trained personnel for deployment and maintenance. Middleboxes contribute significantly to a network's capital and operational costs. In addition, organizations often require their traffic to pass through a specific sequence of middleboxes for compliance with security and performance policies. This makes the middlebox deployment and maintenance tasks even…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) shed new light for the design, deployment, and management of cloud networks. Many network functions such as firewalls, load balancers, and intrusion detection systems can be virtualized by servers. However, network operators often have to sacrifice programmability in order to achieve high throughput, especially at networks' edge where complex network functions are required. Here, we design, implement, and evaluate Hybrid Modular Switch (HyMoS). The hybrid hardware/software switch is designed to meet requirements for modern-day NFV applications in providing…
The virtualization of Radio Access Networks (RANs) has been proposed as one of the important use cases of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In Virtualized Radio Access Networks (VRANs), some functions from a Base Station (BS), such as those which make up the Base Band Unit (BBU), may be implemented in a shared infrastructure located at either a data center or distributed in network nodes. For the latter option, one challenge is in deciding which subset of the available network nodes can be used to host the physical BBU servers (the placement problem), and then to which of the available ph…
With SDN increasingly becoming an enabling technology for NFV in the cloud, many virtualized network functions need to monitor the network state in order to function properly. An outdated network view at the controllers can impact the performance of those virtualized network functions. In earlier work, we identified two main factors contributing to an outdated network view in the case of a load-balancer: network state collection and controllers' state distribution. In this paper, we anticipate that the impact might be different in case of security functions. Therefore, we study the impact of a…
German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕大学）
Efficient network management is one of the key challenges of the constantly growing and increasingly complex wide area networks (WAN). The paradigm shift towards virtualized (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN) in the next generation of mobile networks (5G), as well as the latest scientific insights in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enable the transition from manually managed networks nowadays to fully autonomic and dynamic self-organized networks (SON). This helps to meet the KPIs and reduce at the same time operational costs (OPEX). In this paper, an AI driven concept is pres…
In this paper, network function virtualization (NFV) is identified as a promising key technology that can contribute to energy-efficiency improvement in 5G networks. an optical network supported architecture is proposed and investigated in this work to provide the wired infrastructure needed in 5G networks and to support NFV towards an energy efficient 5G networks. In this architecture the mobile core network functions as well as baseband function are virtualized and provided as VMs. the impact of the total number of active users in the network, backhaul/fronthaul configurations and VM inter-t…
Network coding (NC) is a novel coding technology that can be seen as a generalization of classic point-to-point coding. As with classic coding, both information theoretical and algebraic views bring different and complementary insights of NC benefits and corresponding tradeoffs. However, the multi-user nature of NC and its inherent applicability across all layers of the protocol stack, call for novel design approaches towards efficient practical implementation of this technology. In this paper, we present a possible way forward to the design of NC as a virtual network functionality offered to …
Future mobile networks supporting Internet of Things are expected to provide both high throughput and low latency to user-specific services. One way to overcome this challenge is to adopt Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Besides latency constraints, these services may have strict function chaining requirements. The distribution of network functions over different hosts and more flexible routing caused by service function chaining raise new challenges for end-to-end performance analysis. In this paper, as a first step, we analyze an end-to-end communi…
The fifth-generation mobile evolution enables transformations on Next-Generation Radio Access Networks (NG-RAN). The RAN protocol stack is split into eight disaggregated options combined in three network units, i.e., Central, Distributed, and Radio. Besides that, further advances allow the RAN functions to be virtualized on top of general-purpose hardware, using the concept of virtualized RAN (vRAN). The Combination of NG-RAN and vRAN results in vNG-RAN, which enables the management of the disaggregated units and protocols as a set of radio functions. However, the orchestration-based placement…
5G has a main requirement of highly flexible, ultralow latency and ultra-high bandwidth virtualized infrastructure in order to deliver end-to-end services. This requirement can be met by efficiently integrating all network segments (radio access, aggregation and core) with heterogeneous wireless and optical technologies (5G, mmWave, LTE/LTE-A, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, MPLS, WDM, software-defined optical transmission, etc.), and massive computing and storage cloud services (offered in edge/core data centers). This paper introduces the preliminary architecture aiming at integrating three consolidated an…
Network functions (e.g., firewalls, load balancers, etc.) have been traditionally provided through proprietary hardware appliances. Often, hardware appliances need to be hardwired back to back to form a service chain providing chained network functions. Hardware appliances cannot be provisioned on demand since they are statically embedded in the network topology, making creation, insertion, modification, upgrade, and removal of service chains complex, and also slowing down service innovation. Hence, network operators are starting to deploy Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), which are virtualize…
Cloud computing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are emerging as key technologies to overcome the challenges facing 4G and beyond mobile systems. Over the last few years, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has gained momentum and has become more widely adopted throughout IT enterprises. It simplifies the applications provisioning and accelerates time-to-market while lowering costs. Telco can leverage the same model to provision the 4G and beyond core network services using NFV technology. However, many challenges have to be addressed, mainly due to the specificities of network services. Thi…
With the increasing demand for openness, flexibility, and monetization the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) of mobile network functions has become the embracing factor for most mobile network operators. Early reported field deployments of virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC) - the core network component of 4G LTE and 5G non-standalone mobile networks - reflect this growing trend. To best meet the requirements of power management, load balancing, and fault tolerance in the cloud environment, the need for live migration for these virtualized components cannot be shunned. Virtualization pla…
Due to the huge surge in the traffic of IoT devices and applications, mobile networks require a new paradigm shift to handle such demand roll out. With the 5G economics, those networks should provide virtualized multi-vendor and intelligent systems that can scale and efficiently optimize the investment of the underlying infrastructure. Therefore, the market stakeholders have proposed the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) as one of the solutions to improve the network performance, agility, and time-to-market of new applications. O-RAN harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, cloud comput…
Network Functions Virtualization, or NFV, enables telecommunications infrastructure providers to replace special-purpose networking equipment with commodity servers running virtualized network functions (VNFs). A service provider utilizing NFV technology faces the SFC provisioning problem of assigning VNF instances to nodes in the physical infrastructure (e.g., a datacenter), and routing Service Function Chains (sequences of functions required by customers, a.k.a. SFCs) in the physical network. In doing so, the provider must balance between various competing goals of performance and resource u…
As Communication Service Providers (CSPs) adopt the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, they need to transition their network function capacity to a virtualized infrastructure with different Network Functions running on a set of heterogeneous servers. This abstract describes a novel technique for allocating server resources (compute, storage and network) for a given set of Virtual Network Function (VNF) requirements. Our approach helps the telco providers decide the most effective way to run several VNFs on servers with different performance characteristics. Our analysis of prior V…
The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm has been devised as an enabler of next generation network infrastructures by speeding up the provisioning and the composition of novel network services. The latter are implemented via a chain of virtualized network functions, a process known as Service Function Chaining. In this paper, we evaluate the availability of multi-tenant SFC infrastructures, where every network function is modeled as a multi-state system and is shared among different and independent tenants. To this aim, we propose a Universal Generating Function (UGF) approach, suita…
The Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) offers a revolutionary approach to cellular network deployment, management and evolution. Advances in software-defined radio (SDR) and networking technology, moreover, enable delivering software-defined everything through the Cloud. Resources will be pooled and dynamically allocated leveraging abstraction, virtualization, and consolidation techniques; processes will be automated using common application programming interfaces; and network functions and services will be programmatically provided through an orchestrator. OOCRAN, oocran.dynu.com, is a softwa…
In this paper, we propose a design solution for the implementation of Virtualized Network Coding Functionality (VNCF) over a service coverage area. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Network Coding (NC) architectural designs are integrated as a toolbox of NC design domains so that NC can be implemented over different underlying physical networks including satellite or hybrid networks. The design includes identifying theoretical limits of NC over wireless networks in terms of achievable rate region and optimizing coding rates for nodes that implement VNCF. The overall design target is to…
