On System-Level Design and Analysis of Mobile Service Function Chaining in NFV Surroundings

Abstract

Indeed, mobile network operators (MNOs) invest more in infrastructure which dramatically increases costs, risks, and time to market. Fortunately, in recent years the software defined network (SDN) and network functions virtualization principles have come out with the goal of mitigating hardware costs and time to market to deliver new network services. With the use of implemented solutions of SDN and NFV models, MNOs will be able to scale services up and down and decrease costs to align with network usage. All of those expectations could be conducted via flexible mobile service chaining mechanisms through implemented NFV orchestration solutions and SDN controller functions. In this work, we present different designs and analyses of flexible mobile service chaining in an NFV environment in order to provide a new approach in the framework of the 5G network being based essentially on virtualization and automated service provisioning. We use the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network as a use case for discussing both of dynamic and static approaches from a signaling viewpoint. We then setup a testbed platform for evaluating the static service function chaining approach in a virtualized IMS background to validate a part of our proposed approaches. As a result, experiment results show that the virtualized IMS system performance is improved fast in the case of performance degradation of one of its constituent elements by backing a new virtual network function (VNF) based service function path. Moreover, IMS key performance indicators get enhanced concerning registration delay and session setup time.