Quantitative Analysis of Dynamically Provisioned Heterogeneous Network Services

Services in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can have a variety of requirements such as data rates, latencies, and cost that can change during the lifecycle of services. To meet these requirements, various hardware and software resources are suggested for implementing Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). However, meeting all service requirements using one implementation option is not always possible. For example, to improve the performance of VNFs, using acceleration hardware is proposed. Although acceleration hardware can improve the performance of a network function, as they are expensive appliances, they increase the cost of services; this might not be desirable for a particular service user or load that can be handled by cheaper resources. Dynamically provisioning services can solve this problem in which different implementations of VNFs are switched on the fly as service requirements change. In this paper, we analyse this service provisioning approach in terms of performance, cost, and management overhead by experimenting an example VNF.