Network Function Virtualization and Service Function Chaining Frameworks: A Comprehensive Review of Requirements, Objectives, Implementations, and Open Research Challenges

Abstract

Network slicing has become a fundamental property for next-generation networks, especially because an inherent part of 5G standardisation is the ability for service providers to migrate some or all of their network services to a virtual network infrastructure, thereby reducing both capital and operational costs. With network function virtualisation (NFV), network functions (NFs) such as firewalls, traffic load balancers, content filters, and intrusion detection systems (IDS) are either instantiated on virtual machines (VMs) or lightweight containers, often chained together to create a service function chain (SFC). In this work, we review the state-of-the-art NFV and SFC implementation frameworks and present a taxonomy of the current proposals. Our taxonomy comprises three major categories based on the primary objectives of each of the surveyed frameworks: (1) resource allocation and service orchestration, (2) performance tuning, and (3) resilience and fault recovery. We also identify some key open research challenges that require further exploration by the research community to achieve scalable, resilient, and high-performance NFV/SFC deployments in next-generation networks.

Operating Systems and Hypervisors for Network Functions: A Survey of Enabling Technologies and Research Studies

“…Network functions and network function virtualization have been extensively surveyed from the perspective of communication network architectures and protocols, see e.g., [43]- [51]. To the best of our knowledge the perspective of achieving high performance or acceleration of network function virtualization has only been considered in the surveys [52]- [54].…”

“…In a typical deployment, NFs (VMs, containers, and applications) are chained to realize larger NFs, in a process referred to as Service Function Chaining (SFC) [43], [217]- [219]. SFC involves switching and routing of packets within a GPC platform.…”

Reinforcement Learning-Based Delay-Aware Path Exploration of Parallelized Service Function Chains

“…Tofighy et al [8] proposed an ensemble CPU load prediction model that uses a Bayesian information criterion to select the best constituent model for each time slot based on the past consumption of cloud resources. More details in enabling scalable, resilient, and high-performance NFV/SFC deployments in next-generation networks can be found in a recent survey [9], in which Adoga et al provided a thorough analysis of contemporary NFV and serial SFC implementation frameworks, covering topics including resource allocation and service orchestration, performance optimization, resilience, and failure recovery. They also identified the main open research issues in present SFC research.…”

Secure Service Function Chaining in the Context of Zero Trust Security

“…We also consider the management of SFs to be out of scope. Existing work on this can be found in [1], [24], [36]. We also assume that encryption keys used for encrypting the communication between the SFs are securely distributed in advance to all communication partners in the form of pre-shared keys (PSKs).…”