Subject: [Nfvrg] Looking forward to your feedback on the NFVRG agenda

From: ramki Krishnan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 15:25:30 +0000

Dear NFVRG Members,

Many thanks for the interest and participation. We are working on transitioning NFVRG to approved state and looking forward to your feedback at the earliest on the agenda. The agenda is inline and also attached in a word document; this text is predominantly what we discussed in the meetings so far and in the NFVRG wiki page (https://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/irtf/trac/wiki/nfvrg) with minor edits.
Thanks,
Ramki on behalf of the co-chairs

Network Function Virtualization Research Group (NFVRG)

Background
Network Function Virtualization is a key emerging area for network operators, hardware and software vendors, cloud service providers, and in general network practitioners and researchers. This area requires exploring new directions and working collaboratively on how to create network services that utilize a virtualized infrastructure. Network functions that are traditionally implemented in dedicated hardware appliances will need to be decomposed and executed in software elements running on cloud-based infrastructures. One essential goal of this new approach is to reduce capital and operating expenditures for future deployments for networks and associated services. Another important goal is for the network operators to be able to offer value added cloud services to their customers. Finally, new business models will open for the provision of network services.

The technologies enabling the virtualization of network functions are currently in an early stage, and they need researchers to develop new architectures, systems, and software, and to explore tradeoffs and possibilities for leveraging virtualized infrastructure to provide support for network functions. The Network Functions Virtualization Research Group (NFVRG) will bring together researchers and grow the community around the world in both academia and industry to explore this new research area. Beyond the direct activity through the IRTF collaboration tools it will organize research group meetings and workshops at premier conferences (such as IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecom) and inviting special issues in well-known journals.

The NFVRG will focus on research problems associated with NFV-related topics and on bringing a research community together that can jointly address them, concentrating on problems that relate not just to networking but also to computing and storage constraints in such environments. It is also hoped that the outcome of the research will benefit standardization efforts that can get spawned via IRTF & IETF BoF meetings and/or provide useful input to other related standards efforts in ETSI or other standards bodies.

Areas of Interest
* New network architectures based on virtualized network functions
* Network and service function chaining: architecture and implementation (e.g. automation of service chain building)
* Autonomous service orchestration and optimization
* New operational aspects of network and service virtualization, as well as new operational models required by virtualization
* Infrastructure and service function description and programming (languages, APIs, frameworks for combined processing, network and storage programming)
* Coexistence with non-virtualized infrastructure and services
* Virtualized network economics and business modeling
* Security, trust and service verification
* Real-time big data analytics and data-centric management of virtualized infrastructure
* New application domains enabled by virtualized infrastructure and services
* System wide optimization of compute, storage, network and energy efficiency
* Explore infrastructure and service abstractions enabled by virtualization
* Autonomic and real-time orchestration enabled by network function virtualization
The group will report progress through its wiki and presentations at IETF and IRTF meetings. Relevant information and research developed by the research group will be submitted for publication as Experimental or Informational RFCs.

Near Term Work Items
The group shall focus on a concrete list of near-term work items. For each of the items mentioned below, the goal is to explore system architecture, optimization, and open interfaces across components, through simulations and/or real-world implementations.

Policy based Resource Management:
NFV Point of Presence (PoP) will be likely constrained in compute and storage capacity. Since practically all NFV PoPs are foreseen to be distributed, inter-datacenter network capacity is also a constraint. Additionally, energy is also a constraint, both as a general concern for NFV operators, and in particular for specific-purpose NFV PoPs such as those in mobile base stations. This work item will focus on optimized resource management and workload distribution based on policy.

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) are key to not only providing visibility into the NFV infrastructure but also optimizing resource usage for the purposes of orchestration. This work item will contemplate techniques for the applicability of real-time analytics.

Virtual Network Function (VNF) Performance Modeling to facilitate transition to NFV:
While migrating from hardware network appliances, which are typically custom and monolithic, to virtualized software implementations running on commodity hardware a challenge which is often faced is to come up with an equivalence model especially in terms of performance. The work item will consider this modeling.

Security and Service Verification:
NFV configuration is expected to be dynamic especially in the edge NFV PoP 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 with additional implications due to the dependency of NFV on a distributed infrastructure. Finally, elasticity of VNFs entails dynamic scale up/down/out with awareness of the resiliency considerations, completely different with the approach of monolithic implementations. Security issues and relevant solutions related to the elastic nature of VNFs are the objectives of this work item.