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Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
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TY - GEN
T1 - Price and Performance of Cloud-hosted Virtual Network Functions
T2 - Analysis and Future Challenges
AU - Ghrada, Nadir
AU - Zhani, Mohamed Faten
AU - Elkhatib, Yehia
PY - 2018/9/13
Y1 - 2018/9/13
N2 - The concept of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been introduced as a new paradigm in the recent few years. NFV offers a number of benefits including significantly increased maintainability and reduced deployment overhead. Several works have been done to optimize deployment (also called embedding) of virtual network functions (VNFs). However, no work to date has looked into optimizing the selection of cloud instances for a given VNF and its specific requirements. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of VNFs when embedded on different Amazon EC2 cloud instances. Specifically, we evaluate three VNFs (firewall, IDS, and NAT) in terms of arrival packet rate, resources utilization, and packet loss. Our results indicate that performance varies across instance types, departing from the intuition of "you get what you pay for'' with cloud instances. We also find out that CPU is the critical resource for the tested VNFs, although their peak packet processing capacities differ considerably from each other. Finally, based on the obtained results, we identify key research challenges related to VNF instance selection and service chain provisioning.
AB - The concept of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been introduced as a new paradigm in the recent few years. NFV offers a number of benefits including significantly increased maintainability and reduced deployment overhead. Several works have been done to optimize deployment (also called embedding) of virtual network functions (VNFs). However, no work to date has looked into optimizing the selection of cloud instances for a given VNF and its specific requirements. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of VNFs when embedded on different Amazon EC2 cloud instances. Specifically, we evaluate three VNFs (firewall, IDS, and NAT) in terms of arrival packet rate, resources utilization, and packet loss. Our results indicate that performance varies across instance types, departing from the intuition of "you get what you pay for'' with cloud instances. We also find out that CPU is the critical resource for the tested VNFs, although their peak packet processing capacities differ considerably from each other. Finally, based on the obtained results, we identify key research challenges related to VNF instance selection and service chain provisioning.
U2 - 10.1109/NETSOFT.2018.8460032
DO - 10.1109/NETSOFT.2018.8460032
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
SP - 482
EP - 487
BT - 2018 4th IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization and Workshops (NetSoft)
ER -