CDN: Content Delivery Network
The term Network Function Virtualization (NFV) was initially announced in October 2012. A consortium formed by some leading telecommunication companies such as AT&T, BT, China Mobile, and Deutsche Telekom introduced the NFV Call to the Active document (Chiosi et al., 2013). Another new committee established under the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) focused on improving the speed and operating standards. They worked on constructing the NFV standards and their work results as a white paper on Software-defined Network (SDN) and is entitled as “Network Functions Virtualization (Simone et al., 2015). This had been published by a specification group in Darmstadt, Germany. NFV, being a part of that work e ETSI and comprised of representatives from European telecommunication industry from Europe. They produced a standard terminology definition & use guiding the vendors and operators to facilitate better management and implementation of NFV. Herewith, a traditional standard for stability, quality and protocol adherence came into existence in a more refined manner (Borcoci, 2015).
Understanding Relationship Between NFV and SDN
The construction of NVF revolves around the key features of SDNs such as control/data plane separation, virtualization, SDN controllers, and data center concept. The NVF and SDF shares similar goals but both have different working strategies.
The statement that “Due to recent network focused advancements in PC hardware, any service that is able to be delivered on proprietary, application-specific hardware should be able to be done on a virtual machine” summarizes the entire evolution of Network Function Virtualization. Nowadays, a number of network devices viz. Routers, Firewalls, Load Balancers and so on are running virtualized on commodity hardware (Noble, 2017).
With a clear objective of reducing equipment costs and decreasing time to market, NFV achieves elasticity and scalability along with strong ecosystem. The SDN also breaks the bond that relates the control/application software with the hardware. Both the architectures- NFV and SDN need optimization at carrier scale of the dynamic cloud environment (Benington, 2014).
For achieving greater agility, SDN and NFV aim to control automation and virtualization. Whereas optimizing the deployment of network functions (such as DNS, load balancers, firewalls etc.) was the main intention of NFV. The physical as well as the virtual layers that enable to interconnect virtual network function endpoints require large-scale dynamic network connectivity to be deployed (Nunes et al., 2014)
Network Function Virtualization finds its roots in several previously described network operations problems, especially the implications of bundling services by network equipment manufacturers within their platform Operating Systems. NFV can also be applied to appliance vendors in a way that does not take advantage of the processing scale/innovation seen by many customers in their data centers.
Different from NFV, SDN involves different control modules, interfaces and the applications that are mandatory for its proper working. NFV just needs shifting of network applications based on dedicated hardware to virtual containers on Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. More illustratively, SDN is present whereas NFV is future (Matias et al., 2015).
NFV unites forwarding devices and middle-boxes shaping a common control framework. Use of NFV enables network policies to get implemented by the operators irrespective of the placements viz. placement of functions etc. and also it provisions no need of thinking about the steering which includes how to route traffic through these functions. The network services are deployed on generic x86 hardware facilitating flexible resource allocation, scale-out architectures, bare metals or virtual machines etc. (Kolias, 2014; McKeown et al., 2008).
The network services and functions can be further categorized into three major categories- simple virtualized services, service chaining, and services virtualization or platform virtualization.