Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipment with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm. During the last few years, a large number of NFV platforms have been implemented to facilitate the development, deployment, and management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, such platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore their design space. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on the NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with a top-down architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on what features they provide in terms of a typical network function life cycle. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate on the implementation choices each platform opts for. We also envision future challenges for NFV platform design in the incoming 5G era. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose the most appropriate NFV platform based on their respective requirements. Our work also provides guidelines for implementing new NFV platforms.

NFV Platforms: Taxonomy, Design Choices and Future Challenges

Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipment with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm with much lower capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, NFV platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore the design space. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with an architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on the principal purpose of design. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate on the implementation choices each platform opts for. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose or implement the most appropriate NFV platforms based on their respective requirements. Note that this report serves as a complementary document for a published IEEE TNSM paper [1]. We will periodically update this document to include the newly proposed NFV platforms and design choices.

NFV Platform Design: A Survey

Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipments with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm with much lower capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, NFV platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components, and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore the design space. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with a top-down architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on principal purpose of design. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate the implementation choices each platform opts for. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose the most appropriate NFV platform based on their respective requirements.

Design of NFV Platforms: A Survey.

Availability was considered a critical factor of Network Function Virtualization(NFV) platforms. And many existing testing tools with fault injection features for NFV, only aim at availability, while now more and more attention have been paid to the performance degradation when failure happens. Moreover, performance data on hardware/software resources, like CPU consumption, memory usage, are required to collect in performance and fault-tolerant testing. To fulfill the requirements above, this paper proposes a service-based testing framework for NFV platform performance evaluation, under workloads and fault loads. By taking advantage of the Microservice Architecture, the proposed framework will integrate some existing open-source testing frameworks, including performance testing tools, fault injection tools, and monitoring tools, and build a more comprehensive testing scenario. A case study is conducted on Clearwater, a widely used open-source NFV application, to validate the efficiency and usability of the proposed framework.

A Service-Based Testing Framework for NFV Platform Performance Evaluation

With Cloud computing widely used in various applications in recent years, high availability(HA), has become a key characteristic for the quality of these cloud computing platforms. And there are already many fault-tolerant mechanisms that can keep services available when fault happens. However, whether the service performance is degraded under the occurrence of failures is not concerned. Such feature, is now called "resilience", as the extension of high availability, and has become a hot topic in cloud computing. Based on former works of high availability testing on Network Function Virtualization(NFV) Platforms, this paper proposes a resilience test case design method. The method focuses on the service performance of NFV Platforms in face of high work-load and fault-load, and evaluates resilience of Virtual Network Function(VNF) services. Then a case study is conducted on an open-source NFV application, Clearwater. By comparing the test results to HA testing results, we learned more lessons on what failures impact the platform, which proved the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Qibin Zheng

Papers

A Service-Based Testing Framework for NFV Platform Performance Evaluation

A Resilience Test Case Design Method for Network Function Virtualization Platforms