ASSIGNMENT 1

Distinguish the role of NFV and SDN

Wireless and Mobile Communication

Submitted to: Dr. Sanjay Sharma
Submitted by: Raghav Aggarwal (101686008)

JULY 30, 2018

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING
Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology
The design, management, and operation of network infrastructure have evolved during the last few
years, leveraging on innovative technologies and architectures. On top of this innovation, the
service delivery has also progressed. Software defined networking (SDN) and network
functions virtualization (NFV) are key enablers for this evolution.

SDN has been one of the pillars of innovation in network infrastructures, allowing the decoupling
of the control and data planes through an open and standard interface that enables the
programmability of the network. OpenFlow, ForCES, and I2RS are some examples of SDN
technology. SDN has also contributed to the virtualization of the network infrastructure, providing
the foundation to isolate, abstract, and share the network resources. Service provisioning is often
based on proprietary hardware appliances, which imposes some restrictions when trying to deploy
new network services, such as capacity and availability. In this scenario, the network infrastructure
is not flexible enough to accommodate new services or migrate them to other locations due to its
dependence on the physical appliances.

SDN focuses on four key features:

 Separation of the control plane from the data plane
 A centralized controller and view of the network
 Open interfaces between the devices in the control plane (controllers) and those in the data
plane
 Programmability of the network by external applications
The demand for reducing capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenditures (OPEX) has
pushed information technology (IT) specialists toward contemplating designs to achieve more
effective capital investments with higher return on capital. Toward this goal, the virtualization
technology has emerged as a way to decouple software applications from the underlying hardware
and enable software to run in a virtualized environment. In a virtual environment, hardware is
emulated, and the operating system (OS) runs over the emulated hardware as if it is running on its
own bare metal resources. Using this procedure, multiple virtual machines can share available
resources and run simultaneously on a single physical machine. To achieve these targets
successfully, a group of seven telecom operators have formed an industry specifications group for
network function virtualization (NFV) under the European Telecommunications Standards
Institute (ETSI). They revealed their solution in October 2012. Adapting the use of resources to
the actual demand is one of the main outcomes from a virtualized infrastructure, providing
elasticity of resources instead of overprovisioning. NFV has been proposed to innovate in the
service delivery arena by using standard computing virtualization technology to consolidate in
commodity hardware (i.e., standard high-volume servers, storage, and switches) the functions
previously performed by specific hardware appliances. Virtualized network functions (VNFs),
which compose the service chain, are the basic elements to achieve the complete virtualization of
service delivery and are commonly based on computing resources. The interconnection of VNFs,
or traffic steering, is a challenging goal for the underlying network infrastructure. SDN and NFV
are complementary technologies, and each one can leverage off the other to improve the flexibility
and simplicity of networks and service delivery over them.

NFV Framework
The basic components of virtualized platforms where NFV is deployed are:
 Physical server: The physical server is the bare-metal machine that has all the physical
resources such as CPU, storage, and RAM.
 Hypervisor: The hypervisor, or virtual machine monitor, is the software that runs and
manages physical resources. It provides the virtual environment on which the guest virtual
machines are executed.
 The guest virtual machine: A piece of software that emulates the architecture and
functionalities of a physical platform on which the desired application is executed.
NFV Challenges and Solutions
In a nutshell, differences between SDN and NFV can be illustrated as:

REFERENCES

[1] Sakir Sezer et al., Are We Ready for SDN? Implementation Challenges for Software-Defined
Networks.
[2] Hassan Hawilo et al., NFV: State of the Art, Challenges, and Implementation in Next
Generation Mobile Networks (vEPC)
[3] Jon Matias et al., Toward an SDN-Enabled NFV Architecture