Quality-aware analysis and optimisation of virtual network functions.

Abstract

The softwarisation and virtualisation of network functionality is the last milestone in the networking industry. Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offer the possibility of using software to manage computer and mobile networks and build novel Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) deployed in heterogeneous devices. To reason about the variability of network functions and especially about the quality of a software product defined as a set of VNFs instantiated as part of a service (i.e., Service Function Chaining), a variability model along with a quality model is required. However, this domain imposes certain challenges to quality-aware reasoning of service function chains, such as numerical features or configuration-level Quality Attributes (QAs) (e.g., energy consumption). Incorporating numerical reasoning with quality data into SPL analyses is challenging and tool support is rare. In this work, we present 3 groups of operations: model report, aggregate functions to dynamically convert QAs at the feature-level into the configuration-level, and quality-aware optimisation. Our objective is to test the most complete reasoning tools to exploit the extended variability with quality attributes needed for VNFs.