Enabling network function virtualization over heterogeneous resources
Published in 2017 19th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium (APNOMS), 2017
The economies of scale afforded by cloud computing has been a driving force behind the rapid development and deployment of new cloud-based network applications and services. With the massive growth of IoT devices, we expect a sharp rise in the volume of traffic seen going to and coming from cloud datacenters, which will continue to grow over the next several years. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a recent concept which promises to grant network operators the required flexibility to quickly develop and provision new network functions and services in the cloud. As NFV is agnostic to the computing resource, we foresee scenarios where unconventional resources such as FPGAs and GPUs will be of benefit. To this end, we present an architecture based on Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) which offers an abstracted control and management interface over virtualized heterogeneous resources in the cloud. Through a unified set of APIs, this architecture enables both application developers and network operators to dynamically deploy and manage new services in the cloud alongside the underlying network that interconnects them, all in a fully software-defined manner. We demonstrate and evaluate an implementation of our NFV-enablement architecture using the SAVI testbed, a multi-tier and SDN-enabled cloud containing virtualized heterogeneous compute resources.