scholarly journals The Value of Simple Heuristics for Virtualized Network Function Placement

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Zahra Jahedi ◽  
Thomas Kunz
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Models ◽  
Optimization Model ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Np Hard ◽  
Placement Problem ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Network Functions

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can lower the CAPEX and/or OPEX for service providers and allow for quick deployment of services. Along with the advantages come some challenges. The main challenge in the use of Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) is the VNFs’ placement in the network. There is a wide range of mathematical models proposed to place the Network Functions (NF) optimally. However, the critical problem of mathematical models is that they are NP-hard, and consequently not applicable to larger networks. In wireless networks, we are considering the scarcity of Bandwidth (BW) as another constraint that is due to the presence of interference. While there exist many efforts in designing a heuristic model that can provide solutions in a timely manner, the primary focus with such heuristics was almost always whether they provide results almost as good as optimal solution. Consequently, the heuristics themselves become quite non-trivial, and solving the placement problem for larger networks still takes a significant amount of time. In this paper, in contrast, we focus on designing a simple and scalable heuristic. We propose four heuristics, which are gradually becoming more complex. We compare their performance with each other, a related heuristic proposed in the literature, and a mathematical optimization model. Our results demonstrate that while more complex placement heuristics do not improve the performance of the algorithm in terms of the number of accepted placement requests, they take longer to solve and therefore are not applicable to larger networks.In contrast, a very simple heuristic can find near-optimal solutions much faster than the other more complicated heuristics while keeping the number of accepted requests close to the results achieved with an NP-hard optimization model.

scholarly journals VNF Placement Optimization at the Edge and Cloud †

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aris Leivadeas ◽  
George Kesidis ◽  
Mohamed Ibnkahla ◽  
Ioannis Lambadaris
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Research Area ◽  
End Users ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Cloud Infrastructure ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Computing Paradigm ◽  
Network Functions

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.

scholarly journals Path Mapping Approach for Network Function Virtualization Resource Allocation with Network Function Decomposition Support

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
Keyword(s):  
Resource Allocation ◽  
Execution Time ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Virtual Network ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Function Decomposition ◽  
Mapping Approach ◽  
Network Functions ◽  
The Impact

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.

scholarly journals Proactive VNF Scaling with Heterogeneous Cloud Resources: Fusing Long Short-Term Memory Prediction and Cooperative Allocation

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Ran Xu
Keyword(s):  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Dynamic Allocation ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Resource Allocation Algorithm ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Network Functions ◽  
Long Short Term Memory

Network function virtualization (NFV) is designed to implement network functions by software that replaces proprietary hardware devices in traditional networks. In response to the growing demand of resource-intensive services, for NFV cloud service providers, software-oriented network functions face a number of challenges, such as dynamic deployment of virtual network functions and efficient allocation of multiple resources. This study aims at the dynamic allocation and adjustment of network multiresources and multitype flows for NFV. First, to seek a proactive approach to provision new instances for overloaded VNFs ahead of time, a model called long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM RNN) is proposed to estimate flows in this paper. Then, based on the estimated flow, a cooperative and complementary resource allocation algorithm is designed to reduce resource fragmentation and improve the utilization. The final results demonstrate the advantage of the LSTM model on predicting the network function flow requirements, and our algorithm achieves good results and performance improvement in dynamically expanding network functions and improving resource utilization.

scholarly journals Towards Supporting Security and Privacy for Social IoT Applications: A Network Virtualization Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Jian Sun ◽  
Guanhua Huang ◽  
Arun Kumar Sangaiah ◽  
Guangyang Zhu ◽  
Xiaojiang Du
Keyword(s):  
Network Virtualization ◽  
Acceptance Rate ◽  
Security And Privacy ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Network Nodes ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Iot Applications ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
Network Functions ◽  
Dedicated Hardware

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a new way to provide services to users in a network. Different from dedicated hardware that realizes the network functions for an IoT application, the network function of an NFV network is executed on general servers, and in order to achieve complete network functions, service function chaining (SFC) chains virtual network functions to work together to support an IoT application. In this paper, we focus on a main challenge in this domain, i.e., resource efficient provisioning for social IoT application oriented SFC requests. We propose an online SFC deployment algorithm based on the layered strategies of physical networks and an evaluation of physical network nodes, which can efficiently reduce bandwidth resource consumption (OSFCD-LSEM) and support the security and privacy of social IoT applications. The results of our simulation show that our proposed algorithm improves the bandwidth carrying rate, time efficiency, and acceptance rate by 50%, 60%, and 15%, respectively.

scholarly journals Service Function Chain Placement for Joint Cost and Latency Optimization

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 2191-2205
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Khoshkholghi ◽  
Michel Gokan Khan ◽  
Kyoomars Alizadeh Noghani ◽  
Javid Taheri ◽  
Deval Bhamare ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Optimization Model ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Optimization Approach ◽  
Service Function ◽  
Conflicting Objectives ◽  
Network Functions ◽  
Deployment Cost ◽  
Service Latency

AbstractNetwork Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology to consolidate network functions onto high volume storages, servers and switches located anywhere in the network. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) are chained together to provide a specific network service, called Service Function Chains (SFCs). Regarding to Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and network features and states, SFCs are served through performing two tasks: VNF placement and link embedding on the substrate networks. Reducing deployment cost is a desired objective for all service providers in cloud/edge environments to increase their profit form demanded services. However, increasing resource utilization in order to decrease deployment cost may lead to increase the service latency and consequently increase SLA violation and decrease user satisfaction. To this end, we formulate a multi-objective optimization model to joint VNF placement and link embedding in order to reduce deployment cost and service latency with respect to a variety of constraints. We, then solve the optimization problem using two heuristic-based algorithms that perform close to optimum for large scale cloud/edge environments. Since the optimization model involves conflicting objectives, we also investigate pareto optimal solution so that it optimizes multiple objectives as much as possible. The efficiency of proposed algorithms is evaluated using both simulation and emulation. The evaluation results show that the proposed optimization approach succeed in minimizing both cost and latency while the results are as accurate as optimal solution obtained by Gurobi (5%).

scholarly journals Efficient Placement of Service Function Chains in Cloud Computing Environments

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 323
Author(s):  
Marwa A. Abdelaal ◽  
Gamal A. Ebrahim ◽  
Wagdy R. Anis
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Load Balancing ◽  
Response Time ◽  
Optimization Problem ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Virtual Network ◽  
Placement Problem ◽  
Service Function ◽  
Network Functions ◽  
Bandwidth Consumption

The widespread adoption of network function virtualization (NFV) leads to providing network services through a chain of virtual network functions (VNFs). This architecture is called service function chain (SFC), which can be hosted on top of commodity servers and switches located at the cloud. Meanwhile, software-defined networking (SDN) can be utilized to manage VNFs to handle traffic flows through SFC. One of the most critical issues that needs to be addressed in NFV is VNF placement that optimizes physical link bandwidth consumption. Moreover, deploying SFCs enables service providers to consider different goals, such as minimizing the overall cost and service response time. In this paper, a novel approach for the VNF placement problem for SFCs, called virtual network functions and their replica placement (VNFRP), is introduced. It tries to achieve load balancing over the core links while considering multiple resource constraints. Hence, the VNF placement problem is first formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization problem, aiming to minimize link bandwidth consumption, energy consumption, and SFC placement cost. Then, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to find a near-optimal solution for this optimization problem. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The simulation results show that VNFRP can significantly improve load balancing by 80% when the number of replicas is increased. Additionally, VNFRP provides more than a 54% reduction in network energy consumption. Furthermore, it can efficiently reduce the SFC placement cost by more than 67%. Moreover, with the advantages of a fast response time and rapid convergence, VNFRP can be considered as a scalable solution for large networking environments.

NFV Practical Implementation

2018 ◽  
pp. 175-194
Author(s):  
Lalit Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Network Architecture ◽  
Software Implementation ◽  
Virtual Network ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Network Functions

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.

ONAP

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-249
Author(s):  
Eric Debeau ◽  
Veronica Quintuna-Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Network Function ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Public Networks ◽  
5G Network ◽  
Network Flexibility ◽  
Optimal Resource ◽  
Network Functions ◽  
Lifecycle Management ◽  
Automation Techniques

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).

scholarly journals Reconfigurable Network Stream Processing on Virtualized FPGA Resources

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qianqiao Chen ◽  
Vaibhawa Mishra ◽  
Jose Nunez-Yanez ◽  
Georgios Zervas
Keyword(s):  
General Purpose ◽  
Network Services ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Software Applications ◽  
Data Plane ◽  
High Bandwidth ◽  
Network Functions ◽  
Reconfigurable Platform ◽  
On Chip

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.

scholarly journals Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization for Service Providers using Network Slice AS a Service

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 733-737
Keyword(s):  
Service Providers ◽  
Software Defined Networking ◽  
Network Services ◽  
Network Function Virtualization ◽  
Use Case ◽  
Service Networks ◽  
Service Network ◽  
Network Slicing ◽  
Network Function ◽  
Shared Network

The traditional network is configured based on the prescribed network requirements. Sometimes the resources of the network are underutilized and at sometimes there may resource starvation because of the static configuration of the network. As against traditional network, which is operated either as dedicated network or as an overlay network, network services can be operated over a shared network infrastructure. Thus maximum resource utilization under minimal infrastructure cost can be achieved. The on-demand network requirement can be configured dynamically using network slice. The backbone of the rapidly evolving 5G technology is network slice and service networks can be benefited from it. Different network function for multiple tenants can be enabled customized using network slice with each slice operating independently. Network slice can be offered as a service to meet various requirements from the network slice tenant with different granularities. The Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization are the enabling technologies for network slice. This paper discusses various network slicing use case requirements. And also OpenFlow based software defined network environment is simulated to validate the discussions. Experimental results show that the efficiency of the service network is maximized with improved reliability of service

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