Network function virtualization (NFV) has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia as an important shift in telecommunication service provisioning. By decoupling network functions (NFs) from the physical devices on which they run, NFV has the potential to lead to significant reductions in operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX) and facilitate the deployment of new services with increased agility and faster time-to-value. The NFV paradigm is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to develop new architectures, systems and applications, and to evaluate alternatives and trade-offs in developing technologies for its successful deployment. In this paper, after discussing NFV and its relationship with complementary fields of software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing, we survey the state-of-the-art in NFV, and identify promising research directions in this area. We also overview key NFV projects, standardization efforts, early implementations, use cases, and commercial products.

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Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

A Comprehensive Survey of Network Function Virtualization

Network function virtualization has received attention from both academia and industry as an important shift in the deployment of telecommunication networks and services. It is being proposed as a path towards cost efficiency, reduced time-to-markets, and enhanced innovativeness in telecommunication service provisioning. However, efficiently running virtualized services is not trivial as, among other initialization steps, it requires first mapping virtual networks onto physical networks, and thereafter mapping and scheduling virtual functions onto the virtual networks. This paper formulates the online virtual function mapping and scheduling problem and proposes a set of algorithms for solving it. Our main objective is to propose simple algorithms that may be used as a basis for future work in this area. To this end, we propose three greedy algorithms and a tabu search-based heuristic. We carry out evaluations of these algorithms considering parameters such as successful service mappings, total service processing times, revenue, cost etc, under varying network conditions. Simulations show that the tabu search-based algorithm performs only slightly better than the best greedy algorithm.

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Design and evaluation of algorithms for mapping and scheduling of virtual network functions

Research in the Internet of Things (IoT) conceives a world where everyday objects are connected to the Internet and exchange, store, process, and collect data from the surrounding environment. IoT devices are becoming essential for supporting the delivery of data to enable electronic services, but they are not sufficient in most cases to host application services directly due to their intrinsic resource constraints. Fog Computing (FC) can be a suitable paradigm to overcome these limitations, as it can coexist and cooperate with centralized Cloud systems and extends the latter toward the network edge. In this way, it is possible to distribute resources and services of computing, storage, and networking along the Cloud-to-Things continuum. As such, FC brings all the benefits of Cloud Computing (CC) closer to end (user) devices. This article presents a survey on the employment of FC to support IoT devices and services. The principles and literature characterizing FC are described, highlighting six IoT application domains that may benefit from the use of this paradigm. The extension of Cloud systems towards the network edge also creates new challenges and can have an impact on existing approaches employed in Cloud-based deployments. Research directions being adopted by the community are highlighted, with an indication of which of these are likely to have the greatest impact. An overview of existing FC software and hardware platforms for the IoT is also provided, along with the standardisation efforts in this area initiated by the OpenFog Consortium (OFC).

Fog Computing for the Internet of Things: A Survey

In recent years, information communication and computation technologies are deeply converging, and various wireless access technologies have been successful in deployment. It can be predicted that the upcoming fifth generation mobile communication technology (5G) can no longer be defined by a single business model or a typical technical characteristic. 5G is a multi-service and multi-technology integrated network, meeting the future needs of a wide range of big data and the rapid development of numerous businesses, and enhancing the user experience by providing smart and customized services. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based wireless network architecture with four components, i.e., mobile cloud, cloud-based radio access network (Cloud RAN), reconfigurable network and big data centre, which is capable of providing a virtualized, reconfigurable, smart wireless network.

Cloud-based Wireless Network: Virtualized, Reconfigurable, Smart Wireless Network to Enable 5G Technologies

Future Internet devices and network infrastructures need to be significantly more energy-efficient, scalable, and flexible in order to realize the extremely virtualized and optimized ICT/network infrastructures In this respect, this article presents a recent extension of an open source software framework, the Distributed Router Open Platform (DROP), to enable a novel distributed paradigm for network function virtualization through the integration of software defined network and information technology (IT) platforms, as well as for the control/management of flexible IP router platforms To answer the need for increased energy efficiency of the network function virtualization paradigms, DROP includes sophisticated power management mechanisms, which are exposed by means of the green abstraction layer (GAL), under consideration for standardization in ETSI Moreover, the DROP architecture has been specifically designed to act as ?glue? among a large number of the most promising and well-known open source software projects, providing network dataor control-plane capabilities

DROPv2: energy efficiency through network function virtualization

In order to overcome the cloud service performance limits, the INPUT Project aims to go beyond the typical IaaS-based service models by moving computing and storage capabilities from the datacenters to the edge network, and consequently moving cloud services closer to the end users. This approach, which is compatible with the concept of fog computing, will exploit Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) to support personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way and with innovative added-value capabilities. This paper presents OpenVolcano, the open-source software platform under development in the INPUT Project, which will realize the fog computing paradigm by exploiting in-network programmability capabilities for off-loading, virtualization and monitoring.

OpenVolcano: An Open-Source Software Platform for Fog Computing

Streaming of multimedia data is a common application in today's Internet. The trend towards ubiquitous computing raises expectations from the users about enjoying multimedia contents everywhere and with any device. However, current protocols for streaming data (e.g., RTSP) have not been designed for this purpose, thus they fail in providing the user with a transparent and seamless media experience in nomadic life.

In this paper we propose a framework for multimedia delivery and adaptation in mobile environments.We introduce the concept of Personal Address (PA), which is a network address associated to the user instead of a network interface; the proposed framework works at the network layer; it moves the PA among networks and devices to deliver media in a seamless and transparent way.

Streaming Multimedia Contents to Nomadic Users in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In an attempt to assess the suitability of current Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technologies for fulfilling 5G-ready applications requirements, this paper has exploited the CNIT S2N testbed to perform a validation over a complete 5G ecosystem. The testbed supports the telecom network platform developed within the MATILDA Project, which adopts the vanilla versions of the main reference projects/software suites in the 5G field, such as OpenStack and Open-Source MANO (OSM). By including such familiar technologies in the 5G ecosystem, vertical industries would interact with a familiar environment similar to today’s scenarios, which would lower the barrier for creating 5G-ready applications. However, results show that current solutions are blamable for around 99% of the deployment time of applications and network slices, a figure that bumps their lifecycle up to the order of magnitude of minutes proving them still not suitable to fulfill 5G requirements.

Validation of IaaS-based Technologies for 5G-Ready Applications Deployment

Fog computing has been proposed to improve the cloud computing functionality by moving computation and storage resources closer to end-users, thus reducing end-to-end latency to make new personal services available. However, a number of issues need to be overcome in order to deploy this new technology, which include scalability of user localization and data migration, along with new ways of interactions among the involved stakeholders. In this respect, this paper proposes an intercommunication layer that allows to isolate the physical resources while managing the migration of service instances according to the user's position. Moreover, the introduction of specific mechanisms ensure personal services are deployed in a lightweight fashion. Test results will show how such mechanismsguarantee service migration to be seamless with downtimes reduced up to 3 orders of magnitude.

Sergio Mangialardi

Papers

DROPv2: energy efficiency through network function virtualization

OpenVolcano: An Open-Source Software Platform for Fog Computing

Streaming Multimedia Contents to Nomadic Users in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Validation of IaaS-based Technologies for 5G-Ready Applications Deployment

OpenStack Extension for Fog-Powered Personal Services Deployment