Automatic deployment and control of network services in NFV environments

Abstract With the rapid development and deployment of the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology, the number and types of Network Services (NSs) in virtualized environments keep increasing significantly. However, due to the dynamic network and service status, manually customizing an NS in an NFV environment is a professional, time-consuming and error-prone task, and there is an urgent need to develop a new mechanism to automate the deployment and control process of NSs. In this work, we propose a novel Software Defined NS Deployment and Control mechanism (SDNSDC) in NFV environments. By executing the uniquely defined NS deployment and control description files, one can have the orchestrator to generate some specific virtualized middleboxes, based on which the predefined NS functions can be further configured in the NFV network. Finally, a prototype system of the proposed SDNSDC has been implemented based on the Linux container technology. The experimental results show that the proposed methods can efficiently deploy customized network services and accurately control their behaviors.