Network Function Virtualization

(NFV)
Presented By:
Laith Abbas
Index
Introduction
• The concept of (NFV) originated from the
requirement of telecommunication service providers
worldwide,
▫ to accelerate deployment of new network services
▫ to support their revenue and future growth objectives.
• NFV is a new way to design, deploy, and manage
networking services.
• NFV has the potential to lead to significant
reductions in Operating Expenses (OPEX) and
Capital Expenses (CAPEX).
• NFV will facilitate the deployment of new services
with increased agility and faster time-to-value.
• The concept of NFV is quite recent and is a result of
careful experimenting and evaluation by players in
the industry and academy.
Introduction
• NFV aims to transform the network operators architect networks, by
evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many
network equipment types onto industry standard high volume servers,
switches and storage, which could be located in Data centers, Network
Nodes and in the end user premises.
• These virtual appliances can be instantiated on demand without the
installation of new equipment. For example, network operators may
run an open-source software-based firewall in a Virtual Machine
(VM).
• the implementation of network functions in software that can run on a
range of industry standard servers and can be moved to or instantiated
in various locations in the network without the need for installation of
new equipment.
• NFV promotes the implementation of network functions in software
that can run on a range of standard IT hardware in data centers and
can be managed (e.g. moved, or replicated) without the need of
modifying the physical infrastructure.
The Relationship between NFV and
SDN
• NFV, SDN __closely related, independent,
complementary and mutually beneficial technologies.
• NFV is highly complementary to Software Defined
Networking (SDN), but not dependent on it (or vice-versa).
• Network functions can be virtualized and deployed without
SDN technologies.
• The primary distinction between them(the domain to which
they apply):
▫ NFV replaces proprietary hardware network elements (NEs)
with software running on standard servers.
▫ SDN deals with the replacement of standardized networking
protocols with centralized control.
• SDN functions (separation of control and data;
centralization of control and programmability of
network).
• NFV (transfers of network functions from dedicated
appliances to generic servers).
Benefits of NFV
• Reduced equipment costs and reduced power consumption.
• allows to abstract underlying hardware.
• enables elasticity, scalability and automation.
• Improves the flexibility of network service provisioning.
• reduce the time to deploy new services.
• Increased speed of deployment by minimizing the typical network
operator cycle of innovation.
• enable network operators to significantly reduce the maturation cycle.
• provides much more efficient test and integration, reducing development
costs and time to market.
• Services can be rapidly scaled up/down as required.
• speed of service deployment is improved.
• Enabling a wide variety of eco-systems and encouraging openness.
• Reduced energy consumption
• Improved operational efficiency
 How can we
make the NFV
achievable???
Enablers for NFV
• Cloud Computing
▫ hardware virtualization by means of hypervisors, as well as the usage
of virtual Ethernet switches (e.g. vswitch) for connecting traffic
between virtual machines and physical interfaces.
▫ For communication-oriented functions, high performance packet
processing is available through high-speed multi-core CPUs with high
I/O bandwidth, the use of smart Ethernet NICs for load sharing and
TCP Offloading, and routing packets directly to Virtual Machine
memory, and poll-mode Ethernet drivers (rather than interrupt
driven, for example Linux NAPI and Intel’s DPDK).
▫ Cloud infrastructures provide methods to enhance resource
availability and usage by means of orchestration and management
mechanisms, applicable to t
he automatic instantiation of virtual appliances in the network, to the
management of resources by assigning virtual appliances to the
correct CPU core, memory and interfaces, to the re-initialisation of
failed VMs, to snapshot VM states and the migration of VMs.
▫ Finally, the availability of open APIs for management and data plane
control, like OpenFlow, OpenStack, OpenNaaS or OGF’s NSI, provide
an additional degree of integration of NFVand cloud computing.
Enablers for NFV
• Industry Standard High Volume Servers
▫ An industry standard high volume server is a server built
using standardized IT components (for example x86
architecture) and sold in the millions.
▫ A common feature is that there is competitive supply of the
subcomponents which are interchangeable inside the
server.
▫ Network Appliances which depend on the development of
bespoke Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)
will become increasingly uncompetitive against general
purpose processors as the cost of developing ASICs
increases exponentially with decreasing feature size.
▫ Merchant silicon will remain applicable for commodity
functions implemented at scale while ASICs will still be
applicable for some types of very high throughput
applications.
Enablers for NFV
• Software Defined Networking (SDN)

▫ SDN and NFV can be used independently, but SDN makes it

much easier to implement and manage NFV.
▫ SDN manages network complexity via a network-wide
software platform.
▫ SDN provides a programmable and customizable interface
that controls and orchestrates the operation of a collection
of devices.
▫ With it, dynamically reconfigure the network using just
software mechanisms.
▫ Without it, much more manual intervention to configure
the network.
Technical Requirement/Challenges
for NFV
• Interoperability and Compatibility
▫ The key requirement/issue for NFV is to design standard interfaces
between not only a range of virtual appliances but also between the
virtualized implementations and the legacy equipment.
▫ One of the goals of NFV is to promote openness, therefore network
carriers may need to integrate and operate servers, hypervisors and
virtual appliances from different vendors in a multi-tenant NFV
environment.
▫ Their seamless integration requires a unified interface to facilitate the
interoperability among them.
▫ The developed NFV solutions need to be compatible with existing
Operation and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) and Element and
Network Management Systems (EMS/NMS), and work in a hybrid
environment with both physical and virtual network functions.
▫ network operators must be able to migrate smoothly from proprietary
physical appliances to open standard based virtual ones, since they may
not be able to keep updated all their existing services and equipment in
proprietary physical network appliance based solutions.
Technical Requirement/Challenges
for NFV
• Performance Trade-Off
▫ the Network Functions Virtualization approach is
based on using industry standard hardware (i.e.
avoiding any proprietary hardware such as
acceleration engines) along with a virtualized
networks & appliances, a probable decrease in
performance may arise.
▫ The challenge is how to keep the performance
degradation as small as possible by using appropriate
hypervisors and modern software technologies, so
that the adverse effects on latency and throughput are
minimized.
▫ The available performance of the underlying platform
needs to be clearly identified/ understood, so that
virtual appliances know what they can get from the
hardware.
Technical Requirement/Challenges
for NFV
• Migration from and co-existence of legacy while ensuring
compatibility with existing platforms
▫ Implementations of (NFV) must co-exist with network operators’
legacy network equipment and be compatible with their existing
Element Management Systems, Network Management Systems,
OSS and BSS, and potentially existing IT orchestration systems, if
NFV orchestration and IT orchestration are to converge.
▫ The NFV architecture must support a migration path from today’s
proprietary physical network appliance based solutions to more
open standards based virtual network appliance solutions.
▫ NFV must work in a hybrid network composed of classical
physical network appliances and virtual network appliances.
▫ Virtual appliances must, therefore, use/support existing North
Bound Interfaces (for management & control) and interwork with
physical appliances implementing the same functions.
Technical Requirement/Challenges
for NFV
• Management and Orchestration
▫ NFV presents an opportunity, through the
flexibility afforded by software network appliances
operating in an open and standardized
infrastructure, to rapidly align management and
orchestration with North Bound Interfaces to well
defined standards and abstract specifications.
▫ This will greatly reduce the cost and time to
integrate new virtual appliances into a network
operator’s operating environment.
▫ SDN further extends this to streamlining the
integration of packet and optical switches into the
system e.g. A virtual appliance or NFV
orchestration system may control the forwarding
behaviors of physical switches using SDN.
Technical Requirement/Challenges
for NFV
• Security & Resilience
▫ NFV may bring in new security concerns along with
its benefits.
▫ Initial expectations are that NFV improves network
resilience and availability by allowing network
functions to be recreated on demand after a
failure.
▫ A virtual appliance should be as secure as a
physical appliance if the infrastructure, especially
the hypervisor and its configuration, is secure.
▫ Network operators will be seeking tools to control
and verify hypervisor configurations.
▫ They will also require security certified
hypervisors and virtual appliances.
Technical Requirement/Challenges
for NFV
• Reliability and Stability
▫ Reliability is an important requirement for network operators when
offering specific services (e.g., voice call and video on demand), no
matter through physical or virtual network appliances.
▫ Carriers need to guarantee that service reliability and service level
agreement are not adversely affected when evolving to NFV.
▫ NFV needs to build the resilience into software when moving to error-
prone hardware platforms.
▫ ensuring service stability poses another challenge to NFV, especially
when reconfiguring or relocating a large number of software-based
virtual appliances from different vendors and running on different
hypervisors.
▫ Network operators should be able to move VNF components from one
hardware platform onto a different platform while still satisfying the
service continuity requirement.
▫ They also need to specify the values of several key performance
indicators to achieve service stability and continuity, including
maximum non-intentional packet loss rate and call/session drop rate,
maximum per-flow delay and latency variation, and maximum time to
detect and recover from failures.
Technical Requirement/Challenges
for NFV
• Simplicity
▫ It needs to be ensured that virtualized network
platforms will be simpler to operate than those
that exist today.
▫ A significant and topical focus for network
operators is therefore, on simplification of the
plethora of complex network platforms and
support systems which have evolved over decades
of network technology evolution, while
maintaining continuity to support important
revenue generating services.
▫ It is important to avoid trading one set of
operational headaches for a different but equally
intractable set of operational headaches.
Design and Architectural Framework
• The NFV Infrastructure (NFVI)
▫ consists of physical networking, computing and
storage resources that can be geographically
distributed and exposed as a common
networking/NFV infrastructure.
▫ It is the combination of both hardware and
software resources which build up the
environment in which VNFs are deployed,
managed and executed.
▫ The NFVI can span across several locations i.e.
places where NFVIPoPs are operated.
▫ The network providing connectivity between these
locations is regarded to be part of the NFVI.
Design and Architectural Framework
• Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs)
▫ software implementations or virtualization of
network functions (NFs) that are deployed on
virtual resources such as VM.
▫ Virtualized network functions, or VNFs, are
responsible for handling specific network
functions that run in one or more virtual machines
on top of the hardware networking infrastructure,
which can include routers, switches, servers, cloud
computing systems and more.
▫ Individual virtualized network functions can be
chained or combined together in a building block-
style fashion to deliver full-scale networking
communication services.
Design and Architectural Framework
• NFV Management and Orchestration
(NFV MANO)
▫ functions provide the necessary tools for
operating the virtualized infrastructure,
managing the life cycle of the VNFs and
orchestrating virtual infrastructure and
network functions to compose value-added
end-to-end network services.
▫ NFV MANO focuses on all virtualization
specific management task necessary in the
NFV framework.
• NFV introduces the following three major
differences:
▫ 1) Separation of software from hardware:
This separation enables the software to evolve
independently from the hardware, and vice
versa.
▫ 2) Flexible deployment of network functions:
NFV can automatically deploy network-
function software on a pool of hardware
resources which may run different functions at
different times in different data centers.
▫ 3) Dynamic service provisioning: Network
operators can scale the NFV performance
dynamically and on a grow-as- you-need basis
with fine granularity control based on the
current network conditions.
(NFV) Architectural framework has 4 major functional
blocks:
• The orchestrator is responsible for the management
and orchestration of software resources and the
virtualized hardware infrastructure to realize networking
services.
• The VNF manager is in charge of the instantiation,
scaling, termination and update events during the
lifecycle of a VNF, and supports zero-touch automation.
• The virtualization layer abstracts the physical
resources and anchors the VNFs to the virtualized
infrastructure. It ensures that the VNF lifecycle is
independent of the underlying hardware platforms by
offering standardized interfaces. This type of
functionality is typically provided in the forms of VM and
their hypervisors.
• The virtualized infrastructure manager is
used to virtualize and manage the configurable
compute, network and storage resources and
control their interaction with VNFs. It allocates
VMs onto hypervisors and manages their
network connectivity. It also analyzes the root
cause of performance issues and collects
information about infrastructure fault and for
capacity planning and optimization.
ETSI NFV ISG
• ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards
Institute) NFV ISG (Industry Specification
Group)/ to achieve the common architecture required
to support VNFs.
• ISG was initiated by several leading telecommunication
carriers, including (AT&T, BT, China Mobile, Deutsche
Telekom, Orange).
• having 280 Member Companies (115 ETSI Members, 165
participant organisations).
• has four working groups: 1) Infrastructure Architecture,
2) Management and Orchestration, 3) Software
Architecture and 4) Reliability & Availability.
• Has two expert groups: 1) Security and 2) Performance &
Portability.
The key goals of the ETSI’s NFV-ISG

• Reduce network equipments costs and power

consumption.
• Improve time to market of new services.
• Enable the availability of multiple applications on a
single network appliance.
• Enable the multi-version and multi-tenancy capabilities.
• Encourage a more dynamic ecosystem.
Fields of Application and Use Cases
Network Element Function
Switching elements Broadband Network Gateways (BNG),
Carrier Grade Network Address
Translation (CG-NAT), Routers
Mobile network nodes Home Location Register/Home
Subscriber Server (HLR/HSS),
Gateway, MME, , GPRS Support Node
Customer premise equipment Home Routers
Tunneling gateway elements IPSec/SSL Virtual Private Network
Gateways
Traffic analysis Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Quality
of Experience (QoE) measurement
Assurance Service Assurance, Service Level
Agreement (SLA) monitoring, testing
and diagnostics.
 Signaling Session Border Controller (SBCs), IP
Multimedia Subsystem Components
(IMS)
Control Plane / Access Functions AAA Server, policy control and
charging platform
Application optimization Content delivery network (CDN),
cache server, load balance,
accelerators
Security Firewalls, virus scanners, intrusion
detection system, spam protection