Gossip-based monitoring of virtualized resources in 5G networks

The network function virtualization (NFV) paradigm decouples service functions (SFs) from the physical equipment where they are executed, thus increasing the efficiency of resource utilization, and makes networks and services more scalable and flexible. However, in order to efficiently manage and chain SFs to build network service slices in 5G networks, it is necessary to localize (virtualized) SFs together with their current status, which includes their load, attached virtual links status, configuration parameters, etc. To this aim, we propose a monitoring architecture able to track the network location and the current status of distributed and virtualized SFs, by using agents responsible to monitor the status of co-located SFs, both physical and virtual ones. The monitoring agents exchange their information by means of a gossip protocol to increase the reliability of the process and to build a distributed service monitoring architecture. In this way, it is possible to keep service decisions as local as possible, limiting the interactions with a centralized orchestrator, and thus increasing network scalability. We show that the network overhead of the distributed monitoring process is negligible.