Virtual network function embedding in real cloud environments

Future network architectures will be completely reshaped by the emerging Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, and telco operators will likely deploy flexible infrastructures based on the cloud, offering programmable connectivity services and computing/storage facilities in the form of Virtual Data Centers (VDCs). This paper introduces and discusses some challenging technical issues associated with this promising approach, with a special focus on the exploitation of industry-relevant cloud platforms, such as OpenStack, and on network-aware optimal placement problem of entire VDCs, taking into account multiple virtual (Virtual Machines – VMs, virtual networks, …) and physical (host capacities, network topology and capacity, …) resources and constraints. The proposed placement, computed for real production OpenStack deployments, not only satisfies the predicted communication for all VDCs deployed atop the same physical data center, but also accounts for the (real) computing overhead due to intense communication load of VMs co-located on the same physical host, such as in the case of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) embedding, typically neglected by similar existing works.