3.3 NFV Challenges 45
• Availability of network appliance multiversion and multitenancy,
which allows the use of a single platform for different applications,
users, and tenants. This allows network operators to share resources
across services and across different customer bases.
• Targeted service introduction based on geography or customer sets
is possible. Services can be rapidly scaled up/down as required.
• Enables a wide variety of ecosystems and encourages openness. It
opens the virtual appliance market to pure software entrants, small
players, and academia, encouraging more innovation to bring new
services and new revenue streams quickly at much lower risk.
3.3 NFV Challenges
Carrier-grade properties: The telecom service providers have high
requirement on the performance, scalability, fault tolerance, and security on the solutions.
• Efficiency: The NFV platform should provide the tight NF SLAs
on performance or availability, identical to the SLAs offered with
dedicated services. For example, the SLA may specify the average
delay, bandwidth, and the availability for all the services provided
to one customer. To support the SLA compliance, the platform
should closely monitor the performance for each customer and
dynamically adapt the resources to meet the SLAs.
• Scalability: The platform should support a large number of VNFs
and scale as the number of subscribers/applications/traffic volume
grow. The ability to offer a per-customer selection of NFs could
potentially lead to the creation of new offerings and hence new
ways for operators to monetize their networks.
• Reliability: The platform should abide by NFV reliability requirements. Service availability, as defined by NFV, refers to the
end-to-end service availability that includes all the elements in the
end-to-end service (VNFs and infrastructure components).
Elasticity: Building on top of the virtualization technology, an NFV
platform should be able to leverage the benefit of running instances
in the cloud: multiplexing and dynamical scaling. For multiplexing, it
allows the same NF instance to serve multiple end users in order to
maximize the resource utilization of the NF. On the other hand, for
dynamical scaling, when the demand changes, the network operators
should be able to dynamically increase/decrease the number and/or
• Availability of network appliance multiversion and multitenancy,
which allows the use of a single platform for different applications,
users, and tenants. This allows network operators to share resources
across services and across different customer bases.
• Targeted service introduction based on geography or customer sets
is possible. Services can be rapidly scaled up/down as required.
• Enables a wide variety of ecosystems and encourages openness. It
opens the virtual appliance market to pure software entrants, small
players, and academia, encouraging more innovation to bring new
services and new revenue streams quickly at much lower risk.
3.3 NFV Challenges
Carrier-grade properties: The telecom service providers have high
requirement on the performance, scalability, fault tolerance, and security on the solutions.
• Efficiency: The NFV platform should provide the tight NF SLAs
on performance or availability, identical to the SLAs offered with
dedicated services. For example, the SLA may specify the average
delay, bandwidth, and the availability for all the services provided
to one customer. To support the SLA compliance, the platform
should closely monitor the performance for each customer and
dynamically adapt the resources to meet the SLAs.
• Scalability: The platform should support a large number of VNFs
and scale as the number of subscribers/applications/traffic volume
grow. The ability to offer a per-customer selection of NFs could
potentially lead to the creation of new offerings and hence new
ways for operators to monetize their networks.
• Reliability: The platform should abide by NFV reliability requirements. Service availability, as defined by NFV, refers to the
end-to-end service availability that includes all the elements in the
end-to-end service (VNFs and infrastructure components).
Elasticity: Building on top of the virtualization technology, an NFV
platform should be able to leverage the benefit of running instances
in the cloud: multiplexing and dynamical scaling. For multiplexing, it
allows the same NF instance to serve multiple end users in order to
maximize the resource utilization of the NF. On the other hand, for
dynamical scaling, when the demand changes, the network operators
should be able to dynamically increase/decrease the number and/or