Understand Your Chains: Towards Performance Profile-based Network Service Management

Allocating resources to virtualized network functions and services to meet service level agreements is a challenging task for NFV management and orchestration systems. This becomes even more challenging when agile development methodologies, like DevOps, are applied. In such scenarios, management and orchestration systems are continuously facing new versions of functions and services which makes it hard to decide how much resources have to be allocated to them to provide the expected service performance. One solution for this problem is to support resource allocation decisions with performance behavior information obtained by profiling techniques applied to such network functions and services. In this position paper, we analyze and discuss the components needed to generate such performance behavior information within the NFV DevOps workflow. We also outline research questions that identify open issues and missing pieces for a fully integrated NFV profiling solution. Further, we introduce a novel profiling mechanism that is able to profile virtualized network functions and entire network service chains under different resource constraints before they are deployed on production infrastructure.Comment: Submitted to and accepted by the European Workshop on Software Defined Networks (EWSDN) 201

Integrating personal media and digital TV with QoS guarantees using virtualized set-top boxes: architecture and performance measurements

Nowadays, users consume a lot of functionality in their home coming from a service provider located in the Internet. While the home network is typically shielded off as much as possible from the `outside world', the supplied services could be greatly extended if it was possible to use local information. In this article, an extended service is presented that integrates the user's multimedia content, scattered over multiple devices in the home network, into the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) of the Digital TV. We propose to virtualize the set-top box, by migrating all functionality except user interfacing to the service provider infrastructure. The media in the home network is discovered through standard Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), of which the QoS functionality is exploited to ensure high quality playback over the home network, that basically is out of the control of the service provider. The performance of the subsystems are analysed