The dynamic placement of virtual network functions

TLDR

Managing highly dynamic virtual network environments, where nodes and links are created and destroyed based on traffic or energy goals, is a key challenge for Future Networks enabled by SDN and NFV. The study proposes that high‑level orchestration is required to manage these dynamic virtual infrastructures. An orchestrator architecture is presented that automatically places virtual nodes, allocates services, and manages their lifecycle through monitoring and control. A distributed orchestrator prototype was built and evaluated, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed placement algorithms.

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of managing highly dynamic network and service environments, where virtual nodes and virtual links are created and destroyed depending on traffic volumes, service requests, or high-level goals such as reduction in energy consumption. This problem will be one of the main technical challenges to be faced in the evolution towards Future Networks (FN). Emerging paradigms such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NfV) are concrete steps towards infrastructures where network functions and services will be executed as applications in ensembles of virtual machines (VMs) hosted in pervasive standard hardware resources located across a network. The paper argues that in order to manage these virtual infrastructures there is a need to introduce high-level systems orchestration. The paper describes an architecture based on an orchestrater that ensures the automatic placement of the virtual nodes and the allocation of network services on them, supported by a monitoring system that collects and reports on the behaviour of the resources. The orchestrater manages the creation and removal of the virtual nodes, as well as configuring, monitoring, running and stopping software on them. As a proof of these concepts, a distributed orchestrater prototype has been designed, implemented and tested with the results of different placement algorithms presented.