ONAP

Author(s):  
Eric Debeau ◽  
Veronica Quintuna-Rodriguez

The ever-increasing complexity of networks and services advocates for the introduction of automation techniques to facilitate the design, the delivery, and the operation of such networks and services. The emergence of both network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN) enable network flexibility and adaptability which open the door to on-demand services requiring automation. In aim of holding the increasing number of customized services and the evolved capabilities of public networks, the open network automation platform (ONAP), which is in open source, particularly addresses automation techniques while enabling dynamic orchestration, optimal resource allocation capabilities, and end-to-end service lifecycle management. This chapter addresses the key ONAP features that can be used by industrials and operators to automatically manage and orchestrate a wide set of services ranging from elementary network functions (e.g., firewalls) to more complex services (e.g., 5G network slices).

Author(s):  
Bharathkumar Ravichandran

In the fifth generation mobile communication architecture (5G), network functions which traditionally existed as discrete hardware entities based on custom architectures, are replaced with dynamic, scalable Virtual Network Functions (VNF) that run on general purpose (x86) cloud computing platforms, under the paradigm Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The shift towards a virtualized infrastructure poses its own set of security challenges that need to be addressed. One such challenge that we seek to address in this paper is providing integrity, authenticity and confidentiality protection for VNFs.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guto Leoni Santos ◽  
Diego de Freitas Bezerra ◽  
Élisson da Silva Rocha ◽  
Leylane Ferreira ◽  
André Moreira ◽  
...  

Abstract The network function virtualization (NFV) paradigm is an emerging technology that provides network flexibility by allowing the allocation of network functions over commodity hardware, like legacy servers in an IT infrastructure. In comparison with traditional network functions, implemented by dedicated hardware, the use of NFV reduces the operating and capital expenses and improves service deployment. In some scenarios, a complete network service can be composed of several functions, following a specific order, known as a service function chain (SFC). SFC placement is a complex task, already proved to be NP-hard. Moreover, in highly distributed scenarios, the network performance can also be impacted by other factors, such as traffic oscillations and high delays. Therefore, a given SFC placement strategy must be carefully developed to meet the network operator service constraints. In this paper, we present a systematic review of SFC placement advances in distributed scenarios. Differently from the current literature, we examine works over the last 10 years which addressed this problem while focusing on distributed scenarios. We then discuss the main scenarios where SFC placement has been deployed, as well as the several techniques used to create the placement strategies. We also present the main goals considered to create SFC placement strategies and highlight the metrics used to evaluate them.


Author(s):  
Lalit Pandey

This chapter is focused on the traditional network architecture limitations with NFV benefits. Discussion of NFV architecture and framework as well as management and orchestration has been discussed in this chapter. Cisco VNF portfolio and virtual network functions implementation is included with software implementation of the architecture of NFV (network function virtualization). Management and orchestration functional layers as per ETSI standard. The challenges in NFV implementation is also a concern today, which is a part of this chapter.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aris Leivadeas ◽  
George Kesidis ◽  
Mohamed Ibnkahla ◽  
Ioannis Lambadaris

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the way network services are offered to end users. Individual network functions are decoupled from expensive and dedicated middleboxes and are now provided as software-based virtualized entities called Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). NFV is often complemented with the Cloud Computing paradigm to provide networking functions to enterprise customers and end-users remote from their premises. NFV along with Cloud Computing has also started to be seen in Internet of Things (IoT) platforms as a means to provide networking functions to the IoT traffic. The intermix of IoT, NFV, and Cloud technologies, however, is still in its infancy creating a rich and open future research area. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to facilitate the placement and deployment of service chained VNFs in a network cloud infrastructure that can be extended using the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) infrastructure for accommodating mission critical and delay sensitive traffic. Our aim is to minimize the end-to-end communication delay while keeping the overall deployment cost to minimum. Results reveal that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the delay experienced, while satisfying the Service Providers’ goal of low deployment costs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 2782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adeel Rafiq ◽  
Asif Mehmood ◽  
Talha Ahmed Khan ◽  
Khizar Abbas ◽  
Muhammad Afaq ◽  
...  

On-demand service is the main feature of the 5G network, and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides it by virtualizing the existing 5G network infrastructure. NFV crafts various virtual networks on a shared physical network, but one of the core challenges in future 5G networks is to automate the modeling of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) and end-to-end Network Service (NS) orchestration with less human interaction. Traditionally, the descriptor of VNF and NS is created manually, which requires expert-level skills. This manual approach has a big threat of human error, which can be avoided by using the Intent-Based Networking (IBN) approach. The IBN approach eliminates the requirement of expertise for designing VNFs and NS by taking users’ intentions as an input. In this paper, the proposed system presents the Intent Management System for VNF modeling and end-to-end NS orchestration for multi-platforms. This system takes the high-level information related to a specific service, configures it accordingly, and converts it into the selected platform. The proposed system is tested using Mobile Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (M-CORD) and Open-Source Management and Orchestration (OSM) orchestrators. The results section shows that the proposed system reduces the effort of the end-user in creating network slices and provides seamless end-to-end service orchestration.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qianqiao Chen ◽  
Vaibhawa Mishra ◽  
Jose Nunez-Yanez ◽  
Georgios Zervas

The software defined network and network function virtualization are proposed to address the network ossification issue in current Internet infrastructure. Network functions and services are implemented as software applications to increase the programmability of network. However, involving general purpose processors in data plane restricts the bandwidth of network services. Therefore, to keep both the bandwidth and flexibility, a FPGA platform is suggested as a reconfigurable platform to deliver high bandwidth virtual network functions on data plane. In this paper, the FPGA resource has been virtualized by interconnecting partial reconfigurable regions to deliver high bandwidth reconfigurable processing on network streams. With the help of partial reconfiguration technology, network functions on our platform can be configured without affecting other functions on the same FPGA device. The on-chip interconnect system is further evaluated by comparing with existing network-on-chip system. A reconfiguration process is also proposed and demonstrated that it can be performed on our platform. The process can happen in the real time of network services and it is able to keep the original function working during the download of partial bitstream.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Castillo-Lema ◽  
Augusto José Venâncio Neto ◽  
Flavio de Oliveira Silva ◽  
Sergio Takeo Kofuji

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) offers an alternative way to design, deploy, and manage networking functions and services by leveraging virtualization technologies to consolidate network functions into general-purpose hardware platforms. On the past years extensive effort has been made to evolve and mature NFV tecnologies over IP networks. However, little or no attempts at all have been made to incorporate NFV into Information-Centric Networks (ICN). This work explores the use and implementation of virtual Network Funtions (VNFS)in Content-Centric Networks (CCN), and proposes the use of the Named Function Networking (NFN) paradigm as means to implement network functions and services in this kind of networks, distributing the network functions and services through the networks nodes and providing flexibility to dynamically place functions in the network as required and without the need of a central controller.


Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 1173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basheer Raddwan ◽  
Khalil AL-Wagih ◽  
Ibrahim A. Al-Baltah ◽  
Mohamed A. Alrshah ◽  
Mohammed A. Al-Maqri

Recently, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) have attracted many mobile operators. For the flexible deployment of Network Functions (NFs) in an NFV environment, NF decompositions and control/user plane separation have been introduced in the literature. That is to map traditional functions into their corresponding Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). This mapping requires the NFV Resource Allocation (NFV-RA) for multi-path service graphs with a high number of virtual nodes and links, which is a complex NP-hard problem that inherited its complexity from the Virtual Network Embedding (VNE). This paper proposes a new path mapping approach to solving the NFV-RA problem for decomposed Network Service Chains (NSCs). The proposed solution has symmetrically considered optimizing an average embedding cost with an enhancement on average execution time. The proposed approach has been compared to two other existing schemes using 6 and 16 scenarios of short and long simulation runs, respectively. The impact of the number of nodes, links and paths of the service requests on the proposed scheme has been studied by solving more than 122,000 service requests. The proposed Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and heuristic schemes have reduced the execution time up to 39.58% and 6.42% compared to existing ILP and heuristic schemes, respectively. Moreover, the proposed schemes have also reduced the average embedding cost and increased the profit for the service providers.


Author(s):  
I. Chih-Lin ◽  
Shuangfeng Han ◽  
Zhikun Xu ◽  
Qi Sun ◽  
Zhengang Pan

The 5G network is anticipated to meet the challenging requirements of mobile traffic in the 2020s, which are characterized by super high data rate, low latency, high mobility, high energy efficiency and high traffic density. This paper provides an overview of China Mobile’s 5G vision and potential solutions. Three key characteristics of 5G are analysed, i.e. super fast, soft and green. The main 5G R&D themes are further elaborated, which include five fundamental rethinkings of the traditional design methodologies. The 5G network design considerations are also discussed, with cloud radio access network, ultra-dense network, software defined network and network function virtualization examined as key potential solutions towards a green and soft 5G network. The paradigm shift to user-centric network operation from the traditional cell-centric operation is also investigated, where the decoupled downlink and uplink, control and data, and adaptive multiple connections provide sufficient means to achieve a user-centric 5G network with ‘no more cells’. The software defined air interface is investigated under a uniform framework and can adaptively adapt the parameters to well satisfy various requirements in different 5G scenarios.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (23) ◽  
pp. 5167
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Eramo ◽  
Francesco G. Lavacca ◽  
Tiziana Catena

Network Function Virtualization is based on the virtualization of the network functions and it is a new technology allowing for a more flexible allocation of cloud and bandwidth resources. In order to employ the flexibility of the technology and to adapt its use according to the traffic variation, reconfigurations of the cloud and bandwidth resources are needed by means of both migration of the Virtual Machines executing the network functions and reconfiguration of circuits interconnecting the Virtual Machines. The objective of the paper is to study the impact of the maximum number of switch reconfigurations on the cost saving that the Networking Function Virtualization technology allows us to achieve. The problem is studied in the case of a scenario with an elastic optical network interconnecting datacenters in which the Virtual Machines are executed. The problem can be formulated as an Integer Linear Programming one introducing a constraint on the maximum number of switch reconfigurations but due to its computational complexity we propose a low computational complexity heuristic allowing for results close to the optimization ones. The results show how the limitation on the number of possible reconfigurations has to be taken into account to evaluate the effectiveness in terms of cost saving that the Virtual Machine migrations in Network Function Virtualization environment allows us to achieve.


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