Network Function Virtualization: Conception, Present and Future Rashid Mijumbi, Telecommunications Software and Systems Group, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland rmijumbi@tssg.org Niels Bouten Ghent University, iminds, Belgium niels.bouten@intec.ugent.be Abstract: About three years after its conception, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) continues to draw 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 and leveraging advances in virtualization technology, 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. It is also expected to enhance the processes involved in network and service management. As a concept, the success of NFV is unquestionable. In three years, the number of network operators, service providers and equipment vendors participating in its specification lead by the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) has grown from 7 to about 270, including 38 of the world s leading service providers 1. However, the NFV paradigm is still in its infancy. 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. There are still questions on whether the anticipated gains will be achieved in real deployments, and especially, if the numerous proof-of-concepts can be profitably converted into real deployments. This tutorial will include four main parts on NFV: conception, present, future and demonstration. In the conception part, we will present a comprehensive view of NFV. In particular, we will discuss the motivation towards NFV, including its history, system design considerations and anticipated gains. We will also discuss some of the main use cases (such as the customer premises equipment and mobile core network) as well as the NFV architecture as proposed by the ETSI industrial specification group working on NFV. We will introduce the related concepts of software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing and explore the synergies between these three networking concepts, as well as current research and industrial efforts to implement environments involving all three. In the second (present) part, we will survey the different major projects on NFV. This will include all the standardization and specification efforts for NFV (such as those from ETSI, IETF, IRTF, ATIS and BB Forum) as well as early proof-of-concept implementations, collaborative projects and commercial products. With regard to the future, we will perform a qualitative analysis of the state-of-the-art, and hence identify key research areas that need further exploration. These will include management and orchestration, energy efficiency, performance, network and service modelling, etc. Finally, we will present a demo on 1 http://www.etsi.org/technologies clusters/technologies/nfv NOMS 2016 Accepted Tutorial Page 1 of 5
the capabilities of using SDN for service function chaining. The demo will be accomplished by deploying several network functions on the Virtual Wall 2 and dynamically interconnecting them using OpenFlow, with the aim to create individual Service Function Chains (SFC) for different users. Tentative Outline 3 1. Conception (1 hour) A. Motivation, History (Including NFV timeline), Concept, Anticipated benefits B. Architecture, Business Model, Design Considerations C. Examples (Use Cases) D. Related Concepts: SDN, Cloud Computing E. Relationship between SDN, NFV and Cloud Computing. F. Gap analysis for SDN and Cloud Computing to support NFV. 2. Present (State-of-the-art) (1 hour) A. NFV Standardization activities B. Standardization of activities for SDN and cloud computing C. Collaborative Academic and Industrial NFV Projects D. NFV Proofs of Concept and Implementations 3. Future (Research Challenges) (1 hour) A. Management and Orchestration B. NFV Performance C. Energy Efficiency D. Resource Allocation E. Security, Privacy and Trust F. Modelling of Resources, Services and Functions G. Research directions in selected NFV use cases such as Internet of Things, Information-Centric Networking 4. Demonstration and Conclusion (30 Minutes) A. Introduction to the tools used: jfed B. Introduction to the iminds Virtual Wall C. Description of Experimental Setup D. Demonstration of functionalities 2 http://ilabt.iminds.be/iminds virtualwall overview 3 The Outline will slightly change to include a hands on session NOMS 2016 Accepted Tutorial Page 2 of 5
Intended Audience This tutorial will be based on the most comprehensive survey on NFV 4 that is available to date. The main aim will be to motivate and explain NFV (and the related SDN and cloud computing topics) to both experts and non-specialists. The major pre-requisite of this tutorial will be a good understanding of basic networking (equivalent to an undergraduate course). Therefore, it would be appropriate for the general NOMS 2016 attendees. In particular, we believe that it will be interesting for students (undergraduate and graduate), researchers, and professors who are either working on projects related to NFV, or who plan to start projects in the same line. It could also be interesting for professionals from industry who seek to obtain an NFV update in terms of the state-of-the-art, current projects, and real deployments so as to align their plans in line with the future of NFV. Instructors Biographies Rashid Mijumbi obtained a degree in electrical engineering from Makerere University, Uganda in 2009, and a PhD in telecommunications engineering from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain in 2014. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Telecommunications Systems and Software Group (TSSG) at Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT). His research interests are in autonomic management of networks and services. Current focus is on management of resources for virtualized networks and functions, cloud computing and software defined networks. He has participated in a number of competitively funded European and Spanish national projects in this area including the ongoing Flamingo EU Project 5. He is also on the technical program committees of leading Conferences (such as CNSM, IM/NOMS, NETSOFT, IWQoS, AIMS) as well as a regular reviewer for Journals (such as TNSM, JNSM, IJCS) in the area of network and service management. Niels Bouten obtained a masters degree in computer science from Ghent University, Belgium, in June 2011. In August 2011, he joined the Department of Information Technology at Ghent University, where he is active as a Ph.D. student. His main research interests are the application of autonomic network management approaches in multimedia delivery. The focus of this research is mainly on the end-to-end Quality of Experience optimization, ranging from the design of a single autonomic control loop to the federated management of these distributed loops. He is currently participating in the Flamingo EU Project. Prior History This tutorial will build on the success of two earlier versions as well as an invited talk given by the instructors during the last three months. In particular, these events are: 1. Niels Bouten and Rashid Mijumbi, "Network Function Virtualization experiments on the 4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/comst.2015.2477041 5 http://www.fp7 flamingo.eu/ NOMS 2016 Accepted Tutorial Page 3 of 5
Fed4FIRE testbed". Fed4FIRE - GENI Research Experiment Summit (FGRE 2015) 6. Tutorial and Hands-on. Ghent, Belgium. July 6-10, 2015. 2. Niels Bouten, Rashid Mijumbi. Deploying Network Function Virtualization experiments on the Virtual Wall testbed. 9 th IFIP International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS) 7. Tutorial and Hands-on. Ghent, Belgium. June 22 26, 2015. 3. Rashid Mijumbi, Network Function Virtualization: Conception, Present and Future. Invited Talk at Telecommunications Systems and Software Group, Waterford Institute of Technology 8, Waterford, Ireland. September 17, 2015. Supplementary Materials In the links below, we provide access to the material that was used for the tutorials 1 and 2 stated above. The PDF gives a general introduction to the tutorial as well as all the tools used. We then provide the RSpec which is used to describe the network resources and topology and how it can be used to create the network on the Virtual Wall. Together, the RSpec and PDF allow anyone interested to test some aspects of virtualized function chaining using OpenFlow. It is this part that will be significantly extended with more functionalities, for the demonstration part of our tutorial. Tutorial notes: RSpec: http://doc.ilabt.iminds.be/fgre/_downloads/nfv_tutorial.pdf http://doc.ilabt.iminds.be/fgre/_downloads/nfv_tutorial.rspec References [1] Rashid Mijumbi, Joan Serrat, Juan Luis Gorricho, Niels Bouten, Filip De Turck, Raouf Boutaba, Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. Accepted for Publication. September 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/comst.2015.2477041 [2] Rashid Mijumbi, Joan Serrat, Juan Luis Gorricho, Niels Bouten, Filip De Turck, Steven Davy, Design and evaluation of algorithms for mapping and scheduling of virtual network functions, IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NETSOFT). April 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/netsoft.2015.7116120 6 http://www.fed4fire.eu/fed4fire geni research experiment summit fgre 2015/ 7 http://www.aims conference.org/2015/labs.html 8 http://www.tssg.org/ NOMS 2016 Accepted Tutorial Page 4 of 5
[3] Rashid Mijumbi, Joan Serrat, Juan Luis Gorricho, Steven Latre, Marinos Charalambides, Diego Lopez, Management and Orchestration Challenges in Network Function Virtualization. IEEE Communications Magazine. January 2016. [4] Rashid Mijumbi, Joan Serrat, Juan-Luis Gorricho, Javier Rubio-Loyola and Steven Davy, Server Placement and Assignment in Virtualized Radio Access Networks, IEEE/IFIP CNSM, International Workshop on Management of SDN and NFV Systems, Barcelona, Spain. September 2015 [5] Niels Bouten, Jeroen Famaey, Rashid Mijumbi, Bram Naudts, Joan Serrat, Steven Latre, Filip De Turck, Towards NFV-based Multimedia Delivery, IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM), Ottawa, Canada, May 2015. NOMS 2016 Accepted Tutorial Page 5 of 5