TY - GEN
T1 - Looking Glass of NFV
T2 - 2019 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2019
AU - Lin, Yilei
AU - He, Ting
AU - Wang, Shiqiang
AU - Chan, Kevin
AU - Pasteris, Stephen
N1 - Funding Information:
Research was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.K. Ministry of Defence under Agreement Number W911NF-16-3-0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Government, the U.K. Ministry of Defence or the U.K. Government. The U.S. and U.K. Governments are authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/4
Y1 - 2019/4
N2 - The rapid development of network function virtualization (NFV) enables a communication network to provide in-network services using virtual network functions (VNFs) deployed on general IT hardware. While existing studies on NFV focused on how to provision VNFs from the provider's perspective, little is known about how to validate the provisioned resources from the user's perspective. In this work, we take a first step towards this problem by developing an inference framework designed to 'look into' the NFV network. Our framework infers the structure and state of the overlay formed by VNF instances, ingress/egress points of measurement flows, and critical points on their paths (branching/joining points). Our solution only uses external observations such as the required service chains and the end-to-end performance measurements. Besides the novel application scenario, our work also fundamentally advances the state of the art on topology discovery by considering (i) general topologies with general measurement paths, and (ii) information of service chains. Evaluations based on real network topologies show that the proposed solution significantly improves the accuracy over existing solutions, and service chaining information is critical in revealing the structure of the underlying topology.
AB - The rapid development of network function virtualization (NFV) enables a communication network to provide in-network services using virtual network functions (VNFs) deployed on general IT hardware. While existing studies on NFV focused on how to provision VNFs from the provider's perspective, little is known about how to validate the provisioned resources from the user's perspective. In this work, we take a first step towards this problem by developing an inference framework designed to 'look into' the NFV network. Our framework infers the structure and state of the overlay formed by VNF instances, ingress/egress points of measurement flows, and critical points on their paths (branching/joining points). Our solution only uses external observations such as the required service chains and the end-to-end performance measurements. Besides the novel application scenario, our work also fundamentally advances the state of the art on topology discovery by considering (i) general topologies with general measurement paths, and (ii) information of service chains. Evaluations based on real network topologies show that the proposed solution significantly improves the accuracy over existing solutions, and service chaining information is critical in revealing the structure of the underlying topology.
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U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2019.8737393
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOM.2019.8737393
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85068218260
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
SP - 1774
EP - 1782
BT - INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 29 April 2019 through 2 May 2019
ER -