Virtual Radar: A Novel and Advanced Tool for Monitoring Virtualized Networks

Abstract

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a core element of Next Generation Networks (NGNs), which aim at offering users feature-rich and QoS-enabled high-speed multimedia services. With the widespread usage of cloud computing, network function virtualization has emerged as a way to cloudify and virtualize networking resources. However, the complexity of cloud-based virtualized networks requires accurate and efficient monitoring of resources, in order to detect problems and oversee the network's operation. Few monitoring approaches and tools have been proposed in the literature. However, none of those solutions is lightweight, resource- efficient, or tailored to the needs of complex virtualized networks. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing a sophisticated and resource-efficient monitoring approach for virtualized networks - our tool is dubbed Virtual Radar. We use the virtualized IMS as a case study for testing and demonstrating the capabilities of our system. Compared to the existing monitoring tools, Virtual Radar gives a comprehensive view of a large number of high-level and low-level networking parameters and does so while imposing minimal monitoring overhead, offering a high monitoring resolution and high scalability - thus making it a valuable tool for virtual networks' monitoring.