NFV-Inspector: A Systematic Approach to Profile and Analyze Virtual Network Functions

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) focuses on decoupling network functions from proprietary hardware (i.e., middleboxes) by leveraging virtualization technology. Combining it with Software Defined Networking (SDN) enables us to chain network services much easier and faster. The main idea of using these technologies is to consolidate several Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) into a fewer number of commodity servers to reduce costs, increase VNFs fluidity and improve resource efficiency. However, the resource allocation and placement of VNFs in the network is a multifaceted decision problem that depends on many factors, including VNFs resource demand characteristics, arrival rate, configuration of underlying infrastructure, available resources and agreed Quality of Services (QoS) in Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This paper presents a bottom-up open-source NFV analysis platform (NFV-Inspector) to (1) systematically profile and classify VNFs based on resource capacities, traffic demand rate, underlying system properties, placement of VNFs in the network, etc. and (2) extract/calculate the correlation among the QoS metrics and resource utilization of VNFs. We evaluated our approach using an emulated virtual Evolved Packet Core platform (Open5GCore) to showcase how complex relation among various NFV service chains can be systematically profiled and analyzed.