Title: On flow isolation mechanism for different applications in NFV controller

Authors: Xian-Ming Gao; Bao-Sheng Wang; Hua-Wei Xue; Jing Tao

Addresses: College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China ' College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China ' College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China ' College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

Abstract: Network functions virtualisation (NFV) has become a novel network technology, which installs various virtual network functions (VNF) into commodity servers. And the control planes of VNFs in the same controller share bandwidth resource. So it needs a scheduling mechanism to ensure the fairness of link bandwidth among control planes. Unfortunately, research communities do not pay any attention for the challenge above. Thus, this paper proposes a historical overhead-based flow isolation mechanism (HOB-FIM) to ensure that each control plane occupies a fixed amount of bandwidth resources. It can determine the scheduling priority of control plane by calculating the historical overhead of each control plane. Our experimental results prove that our proposed mechanism has superiority over FIFO algorithm in terms of the fairness of shared link bandwidth in NFV controller. Lastly, it also can provide support for the delay-sensitive control plane in VNFs.

Keywords: network function virtualisation; NFV controller; flow isolation; historical overheads; scheduling; link bandwidth fairness; virtual network functions; shared link bandwidth; delay-sensitive control.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPSA.2016.080671

International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture, 2016 Vol.6 No.3, pp.179 - 186

Received: 28 Mar 2016
Accepted: 12 Sep 2016

Published online: 01 Dec 2016 *

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