Looking Glass of NFV: Inferring the Structure and State of NFV Network from External Observations
Looking Glass of NFV: Inferring the Structure and State of NFV Network from External Observations
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NFV 的镜子：从外部观察推断 NFV 网络的结构和状态
DOI：
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Stephen Pasteris
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文献类型：
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作者：
Yilei Lin;T. He;Shiqiang Wang;K. Chan;Stephen Pasteris
网络功能虚拟化（NFV）的快速发展使得通信网络能够使用部署在通用IT硬件上的虚拟网络功能（VNF）来提供网内服务。虽然现有的关于NFV的研究集中在如何从提供商的角度提供VNF，但对于如何从用户的角度验证所提供的资源知之甚少。在这项工作中，我们通过开发一个旨在“研究”NFV网络的推理框架，迈出了解决这个问题的第一步。我们的框架推断由VNF实例、测量流的入口/出口点以及其路径上的关键点（分支/加入点）形成的覆盖的结构和状态。我们的解决方案仅使用外部观察，例如所需的服务链和端到端性能测量。除了新的应用场景，我们的工作也从根本上推进了最先进的拓扑发现，考虑（i）一般的拓扑结构与一般的测量路径，和（ii）服务链的信息。基于真实的网络拓扑结构的评估表明，所提出的解决方案显着提高了现有的解决方案的准确性，和服务链信息是揭示底层拓扑结构的关键。
The rapid development of network function virtualization (NFV) enables a communication network to provide in-network services using virtual network functions (VNFs) deployed on general IT hardware. While existing studies on NFV focused on how to provision VNFs from the provider’s perspective, little is known about how to validate the provisioned resources from the user’s perspective. In this work, we take a first step towards this problem by developing an inference framework designed to “look into” the NFV network. Our framework infers the structure and state of the overlay formed by VNF instances, ingress/egress points of measurement flows, and critical points on their paths (branching/joining points). Our solution only uses external observations such as the required service chains and the end-to-end performance measurements. Besides the novel application scenario, our work also fundamentally advances the state of the art on topology discovery by considering (i) general topologies with general measurement paths, and (ii) information of service chains. Evaluations based on real network topologies show that the proposed solution significantly improves the accuracy over existing solutions, and service chaining information is critical in revealing the structure of the underlying topology.