VNF Placement Problem: A Multi-Tenant Intent-Based Networking Approach

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the way networking services are offered and deployed. Moving away from a rigid and hardware-centric approach, where expensive and dedicated network components are used, NFV is now leveraging standard x86 servers, where softwarized images of network functions (NFs) can be hosted as Virtual Machines (VNFs) or containers (CNFs). However, in terms of deploying, configuring, and interconnecting these softwarized images, a lot of manual intervention is required. To this end, the Intent-Based Networking (IBN) paradigm has emerged, which has as a goal to automate the network configuration by translating a high-level and abstract request of a network service into a detailed policy description. Usually, IBN and NFV are studied separately, even though in reality they are highly correlated and can benefit from each other. In particular, network services can be expressed as abstract service requirements from the users, where through an IBN System (IBNS) will be translated into specific network policies and a VNF/CNF deployment solution, called VNF Placement solution. Accordingly, in this paper, we aim to combine these two technologies together in order to automate the deployment of the VNFs in a Cloud-based infrastructure, while supporting multitenancy and intent refinement. Our results reveal that an IBN-based VNF placement solution can successfully offer network services, expressed as user intents, in such a way that the network services are automatically configured according to the quality of service and security requirements included in the intent.