Agile and Dynamic Virtualized Network Functions Wiring in Network Services

Abstract

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) established the key reference architectural framework for Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The NFV framework supports several phases (e.g., design, deploy, and manage) that make up the life-cycle of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) along with their connectivity through the Network Service (NS) concept. Furthermore, coupled with Software-Defined Networking (SDN), NFV provides a dynamic reshaping of the network control plane. For a proper NS provisioning, network providers should anticipate and handle all the possible and practical VNFs composition scenarios, even those that are either rarely or never used. This results in costly, tedious, and time-consuming procedures when designing, deploying, and managing NSs. To overcome these limitations, NSs can be further improved by using techniques that have not been deeply explored yet. In this paper, we advocate for routing VNFs with re-configurable wiring capabilities as a novel concept that would allow agile and dynamic VNFs wiring from design-time to run-time. To validate this work, we developed a proof-of-concept as a plugin on top of ETSI Open Source MANO, as well as, a running vehicle platooning prototype. The performed experiments show that our approach: (i) performs better than the SDN-based solution in terms of latency and Mean Time-To-Operation (MTTO), and (ii) shows that the associated cost, with regard to SDN-based solution. remains acceptable.