Design of NFV Platforms: A Survey
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Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipments with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm with much lower capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, NFV platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components, and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore the design space. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with a top-down architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on principal purpose of design. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate the implementation choices each platform opts for. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose the most appropriate NFV platform based on their respective requirements.
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