Experimental demonstration of NFV deployment with RPi and MAAS

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a hot topic in computer networking and aims to replace proprietary, hardware-based networking services with virtualized, cloud-based network functions. However, the current implementation of NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) often relies on either expensive or high-overhead cloud resources, such as AWS and OpenStack, as the NFV infrastructure (NFVI), which may limit research and deployment in edge computing scenarios. To address this issue, our work proposes a cost-effective solution to set up an NFVI suitable for both testbed research and production edge deployment. We suggest using a cluster of Raspberry Pi (RPi) powered by Canonical Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) as a bare-metal cloud infrastructure to establish an NFVI for Virtual Network Functions (VNF) deployment from Open-Source MANO (OSM).