Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 9 December 2015
- journal article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE Access
- Vol. 3, 2542-2553
- https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2015.2499271
Abstract
Diverse proprietary network appliances increase both the capital and operational expense of service providers, meanwhile causing problems of network ossification. Network function virtualization (NFV) is proposed to address these issues by implementing network functions as pure software on commodity and general hardware. NFV allows flexible provisioning, deployment, and centralized management of virtual network functions. Integrated with SDN, the software-defined NFV architecture further offers agile traffic steering and joint optimization of network functions and resources. This architecture benefits a wide range of applications (e.g., service chaining) and is becoming the dominant form of NFV. In this survey, we present a thorough investigation of the development of NFV under the software-defined NFV architecture, with an emphasis on service chaining as its application. We first introduce the software-defined NFV architecture as the state of the art of NFV and present relationships between NFV and SDN. Then, we provide a historic view of the involvement from middlebox to NFV. Finally, we introduce significant challenges and relevant solutions of NFV, and discuss its future research directions by different application domains.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (2013CB329105)
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (61300224, 61301080, 61171065, 61273214, 91338203, 91338102)
- International Science and Technology Collaboration Program through the Ministry of Science and Technology, China, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (2014DFT10070, 61572220)
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