Softwarization of Network Coding Functions and Logical Mapping to SDN

Abstract

It is becoming clear that softwarization and virtualization of networking entail fundamental changes in how networking industry can control or troubleshoot traffic flows or enforce network-wide policies. Also application developers bystander major changes, with new opportunities for fast development of innovative applications and services. Network functions (NFs) are key building blocks to realise such potential. Indeed, NFs are currently subject of great development by diverse vendors for a large range of applications beyond traditional well known networking functionalities. Such new capabilities may benefit from flexible and scalable design as opposite to current blackbox view of NFs. In this paper we propose one such novel NF with flexible and scalable design. Our NF exploits the capabilities of the network coding (NC) concept to improve different metrics of service performance, hence resulting in a NC service that can be offered either to external customers or used as internal service by the network provider. Our main contribution is three-fold. First, we justify our approach of internal logical visibility of network coding functions (NCFs), which allows proprietary while interoperable NCFs. Second, we propose the modelling of NCFs internal logic in terms of their software functional architecture. Finally, we show that our functional logic naturally maps to softwarized network architectures, which in turn facilitates NCFs virtualization. We also discuss the applicability of our architectures to representative conceptual scenarios and identify next steps.