Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey

By Yong Li, Min Chen. IEEE Access, 2015

470 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Diverse proprietary network appliances increase both the capital and operational expense of service providers, meanwhile causing problems of network ossification. Network function virtualization (NFV) is proposed to address these issues by implementing network functions as pure software on commodity and general hardware. NFV allows flexible provisioning, deployment, and centralized management of virtual network functions. Integrated with SDN, the software-defined NFV architecture further offers agile traffic steering and joint optimization of network functions and resources. This architecture benefits a wide range of applications (e.g., service chaining) and is becoming the dominant form of NFV. In this survey, we present a thorough investigation of the development of NFV under the software-defined NFV architecture, with an emphasis on service chaining as its application. We first introduce the software-defined NFV architecture as the state of the art of NFV and present relationships between NFV and SDN. Then, we provide a historic view of the involvement from middlebox to NFV. Finally, we introduce significant challenges and relevant solutions of NFV, and discuss its future research directions by different application domains.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4bf6a0a782450383bca2b91eac34a64a083acb5

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Citations in the corpus

Edge Computing in 5G: A Review (2019, background): “1 Software-defined network (SDN) defines a network architecture that separates a network into control and data planes to provide flexible and agile networks, which helps to simplify network management and deploy new services [43].”
Survey on Network Slicing for Internet of Things Realization in 5G Networks (2021, background): “Centralised control, network pro-grammability and abstraction are the key beneﬁts of SDN. NFV is a concept which is used to package network functions such routing, load balancing and ﬁrewalls as software applications, so that they can run on commodity and general hardware devices [9].”
Network Slicing and Softwarization: A Survey on Principles, Enabling Technologies, and Solutions (2018, background): “Other relevant articles in light of network slicing and its enablers such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are also presented in [10], [11], [85] and [12]–[14], respectively.”
Mobile Edge Computing, Fog et al.: A Survey and Analysis of Security Threats and Challenges (2016, background): “Protocol and Network Security — — — [86][93][94] [95][96][97]”
A Survey of Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Software Defined Networking (SDN): Research Issues and Challenges (2019, methodology): “[56], [57], Internet of Things (IoT) [58], edge computing [59], Wide Area Networks (WAN) [60], cloud computing [61], Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [62], [63].”
Hybrid SDN Networks: A Survey of Existing Approaches (2018, background): “Several surveys have covered the virtualization of SDN networks [93], [94] and SDN network functions [95].”
Narrow Band Internet of Things (2017, background): “high-data-rate services (such as video service) and low-datarate services (such as meter reading service) [4].”
Resource Allocation in NFV: A Comprehensive Survey (2016, background): “However, we emphasize that the virtualization and deployment of network functions do not necessarily rely on SDN technologies, and viceversa [4], [35].”
Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things in the Context of Industry 4.0 (2016, unknown): “software virtualization technology [22], [23].”
A Survey on Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks: Challenges and Design Requirements (2017, background): “Surveys in [12]–[18] provides a comprehensive review of SDN in enterprise and wireless networks, whereas Li and Chen [19] research pertains to SDN and NFV. Surveys in [20]–[26] review the application of SDN in cloud, fog, mobile cloud, and mobile edge computing.”
Smart Factory of Industry 4.0: Key Technologies, Application Case, and Challenges (2018, methodology): “by a software, which facilitates network management and satisfies requirements of dynamic networks for intelligent manufacturing [57], [58].”
Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks (2019, background): “Hence, NFV is eminently suitable for service diversification and promotes the standardization of networking equipment [168].”