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

By Rashid Mijumbi, J. Serrat, J. Gorricho, N. Bouten, Filip De Turck, Raouf Boutaba. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2015

1,831 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/340c6b4f57b8125f644c0e937934b0c6b23603ac

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

A survey on service function chaining (2016, background): “SFC architecture provides a service to the NFV model by interconnecting different virtual functions (or service functions) in a specific order [77, 79].”
On Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Survey of the Emerging 5G Network Edge Cloud Architecture and Orchestration (2017, positive): “It equally allows flexibility in both data plane and control plane, by scaling up and down the allocated resources reflecting evolving service demands [86], [87].”
Quantum Machine Learning for 6G Communication Networks: State-of-the-Art and Vision for the Future (2019, methodology): “To enable these and other services, the 5G network infrastructure is based on the revo-lutionary novel concepts of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [51] and end-to-end Network Slicing (NS) [52].”
An Approach for Service Function Chain Routing and Virtual Function Network Instance Migration in Network Function Virtualization Architectures (2017, background): “T HE concept of NFV originated from service providers looking to increase the agility and ﬂexibility of deploying new network services to support growing customer demands [1].”
Hybrid SDN Networks: A Survey of Existing Approaches (2018, background): “In network virtualization, hardware and software network resources can be combined to form a single virtual network resource object or a single resource can be “sliced” into multiple virtual resources [93], [94], [152]–[158].”
A Survey on Information and Communication Technologies for Industry 4.0: State-of-the-Art, Taxonomies, Perspectives, and Challenges (2019, background): “Regarding the physical infrastructure, we add that a clear overall trend towards both softwarization and adoption of open standards can be seen, considering—besides the already mentioned Software Deﬁned Networking—also the paradigms known as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [261], and SDR [246]”
5G network slicing using SDN and NFV- A survey of taxonomy, architectures and future challenges (2019, methodology): “According to Mijumbi et al. [84] , the traditional role of service provider on a cloud computing environment is divided into two categories namely: (a) the Infrastructure Providers (InPs), and (b) Service Providers (SPs).”
Satellite Mobile Edge Computing: Improving QoS of High-Speed Satellite-Terrestrial Networks Using Edge Computing Techniques (2019, background): “Besides, NFV provides great advantages in reducing the cost and time of deploying new services in SMECs for the network providers [14].”
Resource Allocation in NFV: A Comprehensive Survey (2016, background): “on virtualized resources co-exist with those running on physical resources [10].”
Orchestrating Virtualized Network Functions (2015, background): “An emerging and promising technology that can address these limitations is Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [9], [10].”
5G roadmap: 10 key enabling technologies (2016, background): “We briefly explain each component [49] as follows.”
Toward Edge Intelligence: Multiaccess Edge Computing for 5G and Internet of Things (2020, neutral): “With NFV, a given service can be decomposed into a set of virtual network functions (VNFs) that can be implemented in software executed on industry-level physical servers [42].”
Network Slicing and Softwarization: A Survey on Principles, Enabling Technologies, and Solutions (2018, background): “An overview of different orchestrator solutions is provided in [10] and [87], while two of the most comprehensive ones, that can be applied for network slicing, are the following:”
A Service-Oriented Deployment Policy of End-to-End Network Slicing Based on Complex Network Theory (2018, background): “Recently, with the rise of NFV concept [22], [23] and opensource platform, such as OPNFV [24], OpenMANO [25] and OpenBATON [26], there are significant efforts to VNF management and orchestration [9].”
A comprehensive survey of Network Function Virtualization (2018, methodology): “Once ew requirements appear, a new generation of more sophisticated nd costly hardware will be required to replace the old dedicated ne [24] .”
Survey on Multi-Access Edge Computing for Internet of Things Realization (2018, background): “NFV is a network concept which proposes to use virtualization technologies to manage core networking functions using a software based approach [159].”