Customizable Deployment of NFV Services

Abstract

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) promotes a paradigm shift in the core network, by enabling the execution of network functions on a virtualized software plane instead of on dedicated hardware. Despite its benefits, NFV introduces new challenges, of which we highlight those related to the deployment of virtualized network services. Current NFV deployment solutions (i.e., those for composition, embedding, and scheduling) are usually limited to optimize hard-coded criteria, and cannot be customized to address specific demands defined by both network operators and NFV-as-a-Service customers. In this paper, we present a customizable NFV deployment framework that allows multiple criteria and multiple objectives to be applied to service composition, embedding, and scheduling. We evaluate the proposed framework integrated to deployment solutions specified in the literature. A case study is presented for the customized deployment of a traffic control and security service, and demonstrates the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework.