Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualisation Cooperation-Experiments

摘要

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) represent two recent and complementary solutions of high interest in future networking. Traditional network technologies (using dedicated hardware-software entities) have many limitations related to low flexibility, low programmability and abstraction, vendor dependency, of the operators, difficulties in management, low-compatibility with cloud computing, etc. SDN and NFV bring novel and powerful capabilities by decoupling the Data Plane and Control Plane (SDN), and moving in software (NFV) a lot of functions, traditionally performed in dedicated hardware-software units. However, many open issues exist in both SDN and NFV and especially in their cooperation in integrated implementations. This paper develops a couple of experiments of an SDN environment and the usage of NFV to manage traffic flow. Given the novelty and complexity of the topics, this paper can serve also as a short guideline to help experimenters to begin development of a complex framework SDN-NFV.