Towards Carrier-Grade Service Provisioning in NFV

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology that reduces cost and brings flexibility in the provisioning of services. NFV-based networks are expected to be able to provide carrier-grade services, which require high availability. One of the challenges for achieving high availability is that the commodity servers used in NFV are more error prone than the purpose-built hardware. The “de-facto” technique for fault tolerance is redundancy. However, unless planned carefully, structural dependencies among network nodes could result in correlated node unavailabilities that undermine the effect of redundancy. In this paper, we address the challenge of developing a redundancy resource allocation scheme that takes into account correlated unavailabilities caused by network structural dependencies. The proposed scheme consist of two parts. In the first part, we propose an algorithm to identify nodes that can be highly affected by a node failure because of their network structural dependency with this node. The algorithm analyzes such dependencies using a recently proposed centrality measure called dependency index. In the second part, a redundancy resource allocation scheme that places backup network functions on nodes considering their dependency nature and assigns the instances to flows optimally is proposed. The results show that not considering the network structural dependency in backup placement may significantly affect the service availability to flows. The results also give insights into the trade-off between cost and performance.