Workflow Policy-Based VNF Monitoring Model in Tacker-Based NFV System

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a new network architecture framework that can provide flexibility and agility in network infrastructure. By leveraging NFV, a communication service provider (CSP) can deploy network services as a software known as Virtual Network Function (VNF) running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. Despite the multiple benefits that NFV provides, the scalability of VNF monitoring is one of the main challenges that must be addressed for the deployment of network services in the NFV. In the current NFV open-source platforms, VNF Manager uses a local variable and local threads to monitor the VNFs. If the system has many VNFs which need to be monitored, the VNF Manager server will have to run a lot of threads to monitor them. This causes the scalability problem in the VNF Manager server. To tackle this issue, a workflow policy-based VNF monitoring mechanism is proposed and implemented in Tacker to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed mechanism. Thanks to the proposed monitoring system, the VNF Manager can be more scalable and effective.