Analysis of deployment approaches for virtual customer premises equipment

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) uses the IT virtualization technologies to decouple network functions from proprietary hardware so that they can be run in software on commercial off-the-shelf hardware platform. By leveraging NFV, communications service providers can provide Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) solutions, which reduce the number and cost of physical hardware appliances required at the customer premises for hosting connectivity and other value-added features. In this paper, we discuss three deployment approaches in the vCPE platform, i.e., centralized vCPE, distributed vCPE, and hybrid vCPE. In addition, an experiment is conducted to measure the resource usage in different vCPE deployment models.