Network functions virtualization: An overview and open-source projects

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has emerging as a networking technology from telecom industry to provide agility and flexibility in the deployment of network services and to reduce the Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and the Operating Expenses (OPEX) by leveraging virtualization and cloud technologies. NFV decouples the software implementation of network functions from the underlying hardware, and it provides an abstraction of network functions such as: firewalls, deep packet inspectors, load balancers, among others, via software components that can run on general purpose devices that can be located in a variety of telecom infrastructure, including: data centers, network nodes, and end-user facilities. These Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) can easily be created, moved or migrated from one equipment to another without the need to install new specialized hardware, allowing a faster deployment of the services and providing innovation and a great number of opportunities for the world of networked systems. In this paper an overview of NFV technology is presented, explaining its characteristics, enabling technologies, benefits, use cases and challenges, as well as its relationship with another emerging technology as Software Defined Networking (SDN). The architectural framework and a list with more than 170 SND/NFV open-source projects are also provided, at the end it is described the Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and some research lines in this interesting research area.