DReAM - a distributed result-aware monitor for Network Functions Virtualization

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a key technology to reduce management costs as well as to improve scalability and elasticity of computer networks. Still, recent research efforts have been exposing additional management challenges. Concerning monitoring in particular, new types of entities and requirements are underexploited. To address these issues, we propose DReAM, a resource management architecture based on management by delegation and distributed monitoring, where each agent runs a diagnostic model to compute the network service state. In this paper, we describe DReAM's proposed architecture and its major components. We also discuss the feasibility of DReAM through experimental and analytical evaluations, where we observed application throughput, CPU utilization, communication overhead, scalability, and diagnosis complexity. We provide a trade-off analysis on the monitoring strategies in NFV scenarios. Our results indicate that a result-aware strategy is a better option when the monitored environment has more than 256 agents or when the diagnosis module induces at least 10% of CPU utilization.