Analysis and Management of Network Function States

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is proposed to provide flexible network services and reduce operational costs by running virtual Network Functions (NFs) on commodity servers. The correctness and performance of NFs depend on NF states, which are used to process traffic and configure the processing policy. In this article, we introduce the recent study of NF states. We present NF state classification, introduce methods to analyze and extract states from different NFs, and explain how to manipulate states using existing state management frameworks and state placement models. We also analyze the limitation of the existing works and propose potential research directions of managing NF states.