A Study of Slice-Aware Service Assurance for Network Function Virtualization

In an NFV environment, a single physical infrastructure commonly operates multiple virtual networks (i. e., network slicing) which makes the resource management and service assurance complicated. The network slice is expected to be customer-oriented and meet the Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements as well as conventional Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, unified and QoE-aware service assurance is largely uncharted in the management and orchestration architecture of NFV systems. To address this problem, we introduce a novel framework for assuring the sliced services running in a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environment and discuss the core functions of the framework. Our Service Assurance (SA) framework extends the ETSI MANO architecture. Based on a hierarchical architecture, the framework collates information collected from different layers contributing to the provision of a service within a shared physical infrastructure. Moreover, it allows the creation of a mapping from the underlying infrastructure performance to the QoE such that NFV management and operation can be adapted to assure both QoS and QoE. A set of measurement results are provided to illustrate the significance of such a mapping.