VeNiCE: Enabling Automatic VNF Management based on Smart Contract Events

Abstract

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has been a key part of evolving communication systems in the last few years. However, the life-cycle management of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) is still a not trivial task. Blockchains (BC), due to their decentralization and immutability characteristics, together with the automation provided by Smart Contracts (SC), can be employed to enable such automated and trustworthy VNF management.Thus, this paper proposes VeNiCE to automate the deployment and life-cycle management of VNFs using events emitted on SCs. VeNiCE provides automation and auditability by relying on a BC to provide a decentralized approach for VNF management, which performs management actions, such as VNF deployment and deletion, and based on events and communicates with an SC to provide immutable logging of the VNF life-cycle. VeNiCE provides (i) a frontend for user interaction, (ii) a backend implementing the communication with the NFV framework, and (iii) an SC that emits events, stores VNF allocations, and authenticates users. A prototype of VeNiCE was developed and deployed in the Ethereum BC using OpenStack Tacker as an NFV platform. Experiments were conducted in a real-world deployment of such a prototype to analyze the economic costs of using SCs and the time required to process requests by each component of VeNiCE and the BC. Those results obtained show VeNiCE’s feasibility, highlight its benefits achieved with the automation and provide insights on reducing costs by exploring additional BC platforms and different deployment types, which introduce centralization and management concerns.