An Optimization Case in Support of Next Generation NFV Deployment

Still not long ago operators were struggling with middlebox deployment and traffic management across them. The service chaining problem was a well studied subject which had to deal with the limitations of middleboxes and offer various techniques to overcome them to achieve the desired traffic steering [6, 7]. Only two years have passed its official launch by ETSI [1], but network function virtualization (NFV) has already revolutionized the telecom industry by proposing a complete design paradigm shift in the way middleboxes are built and deployed. NFV requires the virtualization of middleboxes and other networking equipment, called virtual network functions (vNFs). This requirement will allow networking infrastructure operators to benefit from the same economies of scale and flexibility than the information technology community experienced with the advent of cloud computing. Other than the capex/opex saving and faster time to market of new services, the cloudification of networking gives us the opportunity to rethink how networking equipment are designed and deployed. While first generation NFV deployment has already been proved in the ETSI NFV community, we argue that there is yet lots of space for improvement both in terms of vNF design and deployment in order to optimize cloud computing and networking resources. To this end, we foresee various redesign opportunities for vNFs, either in distributing the functional components of a single vNF across the cloud to achieve better performance and scale, or in running multiple instances of vNFs in smaller VMs, as proposed by ClickOS-NFV [5]. Such vNF designs open new horizons to perform optimized vNF deployment in the cloud as studied in this paper. This position paper takes the example of ClickOSNFV [5] and proposes a clever way to address the vNF placement in the cloud and vNF forwarding graph (vNFFG) problem, a name given by ETSI to the well-known service chaining problem which is the process of steering vNF1 vNF3