Machine Learning Approaches to Early Fault Detection and Identification in NFV Architectures

Virtualization technologies become pervasive in networking, as a way to better exploit hardware capabilities and to quickly deploy tailored networking solutions for customers. But these new programmability abilities of networks also come with new management challenges: it is critical to quickly detect performance degradation, before they impact Quality of Service (QoS) or produce outages and alarms, as this takes part in the closed loop that adapts resources to services. This paper addresses the early detection, localization and identification of faults, before alarms are produced. We rely on the abundance of metrics available on virtualized networks, and explore various data preprocessing and classification techniques. As all Machine Learning approaches must be fed with large datasets, we turn to our advantage the softwarization of networks: one can easily deploy in a cloud the very same software that is used in production, and analyze its behaviour under stress, by fault injection.