XeniumNFV: A Unified, Dynamic, Distributed and Event-Driven SDN/NFV Testbed

Abstract

The advent of Network Function Virtualization has changed the way of service provisioning in Telco networks. The ongoing evolutions in NFV can leverage network management facilities offered by Software-Defined Networks but there is not a complete environment for researchers at academia and industry to test and deploy their solutions. In this paper we present XNFV, an open-source emulator for SDN/NFV environment which can be used to design and deploy scalable scenarios on distributed infrastructure. The deployed scenarios in XNFV can be changed dynamically at the run-time without network connectivity interference. To the best of our knowledge, XNFV is the first Event-Driven SDN/NFV testbed that can be used to design complex events and program reaction chains through its user-friendly Web-GUI. We provide a Proof of Capability for XNFV through a case study scenario.