Management requirements for ClickOS-based Network Function Virtualization

Abstract

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a new approach to design, deploy, and manage network functions. In a recent past, such functions used to be implemented at hardware. This approach, besides effective, presents many disadvantages such as increased operational costs, difficulties to scale up or down the network, and deploy new functions. The rise of virtualization technologies, on the other side, provides new ways to rethink about network functions. Instead of specialized and expensive hardware, multiple network functions can share the same commodity hardware, thus contributing to a better utilization of resources. Besides its advantages, NFV is still on its early stages of employment. Important aspects are not yet being investigated by the research community. For example, to this date, the management requirements of NFV remain unclear. Therefore, the present paper addresses this subject, it presents a realistic network function request, which is used to identify management requirements in the context of a specific NFV enabler platform called ClickOS.