REFLEXION

The operators’ networks have significantly evolved over the last few years. Derived from the cloud computing paradigm, new network virtualization technologies are emerging. These technologies bring agility in the management of infrastructures and services while rationalizing expenditures. They also enable network operators to improve the value-added of their networks and datacenters by offering new services. In complementarity to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which aims at decoupling the control plane from the data plane and providing network programmability, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) focuses on implementing network functions (switching, DPI, load-balancing, caching, ciphering etc.) in software and deploying them on (high-volume) standard servers or shared infrastructures. For instance, depending on the load, the provisioning (creation or suppression) of the VM containing the virtualized network function allows to optimize the resources’ usage, and to face the demand, while respecting a QoS level, e.g., as stated in a service level agreement. NFV thus represents a disruptive change in the way networks are architected and operated. Over the next few years, NFV will penetrate further into Telco. However, even though the ETSI’s NFV working group, which now gathers more than 200 network operators, telecoms equipment vendors, IT vendors and technology providers progresses on the specification of the NFV architecture, there are still many research issues requiring investigation. The REFLEXION (REsilient and FLEXible Infrastructure for Open Networking) project is an industrial research project that leans on the complementary technical expertise of the partners to bring (i) robustness and flexibility in NFV-SDN architectures, in particular to support critical services, and (ii) dynamicity and efficiency for the provisioning and the chaining of virtualized network functions. On the first axis, REFLEXION will in particular investigate network failure diagnosis and fault management for NFV in SDN so that services can keep operating in a seamless way, and distribution techniques to increase the robustness of the NFV control and management planes. The project will also provide methods to design robust virtual services taking into account the potential threats in the architecture and mitigation options. REFLEXION will also address NFV performance and dynamicity. Indeed, it is all the more crucial to measure the utilization of resources and the performances of the services in a virtualized environment (e.g., to avoid interferences between the different functions and instances). The project will thus propose innovative metrology tools to passively monitor virtualized network functions with the lowest footprint. It will also provide new methods to provision, re-provision, or de-provision the low-level resources (CPU, RAM, I/O etc.) associated to a virtual machine to meet the performances required for the virtualized network functions within a server in order to meet the global service objectives. Finally, the project will investigate, at the network-wide level, optimization techniques to dynamically (re-)allocate virtualized network functions and chain them so as to satisfy the tradeoff between QoS/QoE and network footprint. REFLEXION will be based on a critical services use case. The new network virtualization technologies affect particularly the critical services such as the e-health sector, business networks, etc., that have strict availability, reliability and performance requirements. Telecom operators (Telco) need to build robust and efficient networks in order to provide and maintain such services. REFLEXION is an appealing NFV-oriented project with a strong potential. We expect REFLEXION results to impact standards and NFV-SDN communities (ETSI NFV, IETF, ONF), the scientific and research areas. The partners have extensive experience in networks, modeling, optimization, virtualization and large-scale experiments.