Optimal orchestration of virtualized network functions for improved quality-of-service
Telecom networks provide vital communication infrastructure and play a key role in promoting the economic and social well-being. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging, promising and cost-efficient technology for future Internet by decoupling the traditional network functions from dedicated hardware and running them as software-based virtualized instances, known as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). To effectively support the emerging NFV technology, how to orchestrate VNFs and achieve improved Quality-of-Service (QoS) has become a timely burning challenge faced by the networking research community. This project aims to develop a new suite of optimal VNF orchestration schemes to boost the network performance and enhance the QoS. To this end, I will firstly design innovative Service Function Chains (SFCs) that are built from a set of chain-ordered VNFs in a parallel pattern to accelerate the network performance. Secondly, I will develop an optimal QoS-aware VNF placement approach to map the parallel SFCs into the underlying network infrastructure, which considers the important QoS metrics as a multi-objective optimization problem. Finally, I will establish a software package with two components for SFC parallelism and VNF placement and develop an experimental testbed to evaluate the proposed solutions. The scientific breakthroughs to be made in this project will contribute to provide the effective design and solution implementation of NFV network innovations. The originality of this research lies in its advocate of designing a parallel SFC paradigm and the optimization of VNF placement to satisfy the QoS requirements of ever-increasing network services. Furthermore, a series of research, training, and knowledge transfer activities will be conducted to accomplish the scientific objectives and enable me to receive professional training, broaden an interdisciplinary research background, and gain more experiences in project management and collaborations.