Subject: [Nfvrg] near-term charter for NFVRG

From: ramki Krishnan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 21:46:35 -0700

Dear All,

For NFVRG, we are looking forward to IRTF draft contributions. To facilitate this process, we would like to hone our near-term (at least next 1 year) charter to a few specific areas. Some suggestions for areas are below. For each of the areas, we would suggest exploring system architecture and optimization with open interfaces across components and explore research through simulations and/or real-world implementations. Would love your comments and suggestions !

Would like to thank Steve, Shishir, Alberto, Anoop and Hesham for the discussions so far.

Policy based Resource Management
NFV DCs are often constrained in compute and storage capacity. Since practically all NFV DCs are foreseen to be  distributed, inter-DC network capacity is also a constraint. Additionally, energy is also a constraint, both as a general concern for NFV operators, and for specific-purpose NFV DCs such as those in mobile base stations that often have power limitations. Hence, optimal resource management and workload distribution based on policy is a relevant area to focus on.

Below are some examples of research work in progress in the area of resource management
IRTF drafts
-        - http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-krishnan-nfvrg-open-nfv-virality-00
ETSI NFV PoCs
-        - http://nfvwiki.etsi.org/index.php?title=Virality_based_content_caching_in_NFV_framework

Security and Service Verification
NFV configuration is expected to be dynamic especially in the edge NFV DCs where capacity is limited; a very good example is handling a viral event such as mobile gaming application. While autonomic networking techniques could be used to automate the configuration process including modular updates, it is important to take into account that incomplete and/or inconsistent configuration may lead to security issues. Additionally, events such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks could be an additional source of compromise. Hence, service verification including logging and analysis in near real-time is a relevant area to focus on.

Analytics for Visibility and Orchestration
Network functions should be supportable on general purpose commodity hardware. Real-time analytics providing insight into various components such as compute (e.g. dynamic CPU utilization), storage (e.g. dynamic capacity usage), network (e.g. dynamic bandwidth utilization), energy (e.g. dynamic power consumption) is key to not only providing visibility into the NFV infrastructure but also optimizing resource usage for the purposes of orchestration. This is a relevant area to focus on.

Virtual Network Function (VNF) Performance Modelling to facilitate transition to NFV
While migrating from hardware network appliances, which are typically custom and monolithic, to virtualized software appliances running on commodity hardware a challenge which is often faced is to come up with an equivalence model especially in terms of performance. This is a relevant area to focus on.

Thanks,
Ramki on behalf of the co-chairs