On orchestrating virtual network functions

By Md. Faizul Bari, Shihabur Rahman Chowdhury, Reaz Ahmed, Raouf Boutaba. Conference on Network and Service Management, 2015

297 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 more complicated. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging and promising technology that is envisioned to overcome these challenges. It proposes to move packet processing from dedicated hardware middleboxes to software running on commodity servers. In NFV terminology, software middleboxes are referred to as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). It is a challenging problem to determine the required number and placement of VNFs that optimize network operational costs and utilization, without violating service level agreements. We call this the VNF Orchestration Problem (VNF-OP) and provide an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation with implementation in CPLEX. We also provide a dynamic programming based heuristic to solve larger instances of VNF-OP. Trace driven simulations on real-world network topologies demonstrate that the heuristic can provide solutions that are within 1.3 times of the optimal solution. Our experiments suggest that a VNF based approach can provide more than 4 χ reduction in the operational cost of a network.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/867ef7fb5195fbedfc14e4b044074fd1ee0869f8

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Citations in the corpus

Resource Allocation in NFV: A Comprehensive Survey (2016, methodology): “Up to now, most of the existing NFV-RA proposals guarantee bandwidth between VNFs, computation power and memory in physical nodes and they even consider end to end latency [12], [56], [68], [70].”
Deploying chains of virtual network functions: On the relation between link and server usage (2016, methodology): “[7] considers the problem of minimizing the total network operational cost.”
Orchestrating Virtualized Network Functions (2015, background): “This paper builds on our earlier work [13] and makes the following contributions: • We provide the first quantifiable results showing that dynamic VNF orchestration can have more than 4× reduction in OPEX compared to hardware middleboxes.”
Smart Cities: A Survey on Data Management, Security, and Enabling Technologies (2017, background): “It plays a critical role in minimizing the cost of VNF deployment and placement, energy consumption and communication overhead of deploying and changing placement of VNF(s) [409], [410].”
A survey on service function chaining (2016, background): “The authors in [99] also propose an optimization model for orchestration of NFV.”