NFV Platform Design: A Survey
Tianzhu Zhang
TL;DR
The paper tackles the complexity of NFV platform design by providing a comprehensive architectural overview and a taxonomy of existing implementations. It analyzes the design space across MANO, VNF, NFVI, and acceleration axes, highlighting cloud-native CNFs, heterogeneous dataplanes, and multi-tenant operability. The authors synthesize design choices, provide examples, and offer guidance for operators to select or build appropriate NFV platforms, while identifying open issues in AI-driven autonomy, network slicing, and IoT integration. This work underscores the shift from VM-centric NFV toward cloud-native, hardware-diverse Telco Clouds and argues for integrated consideration of orchestration, data-plane acceleration, and operational reliability to enable scalable, secure, and evolvable network services.
Abstract
Due to the intrinsically inefficient service provisioning in traditional networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) keeps gaining attention from both industry and academia. By replacing the purpose-built, expensive, proprietary network equipment with software network functions consolidated on commodity hardware, NFV envisions a shift towards a more agile and open service provisioning paradigm with much lower capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx). Nonetheless, just like any complex system, NFV platforms commonly consist of abounding software and hardware components and usually incorporate disparate design choices based on distinct motivations or use cases. This broad collection of convoluted alternatives makes it extremely arduous for network operators to make proper choices. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to investigating different aspects of NFV, none of them specifically focused on NFV platforms or attempted to explore the design space. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on NFV platform design. Our study solely targets existing NFV platform implementations. We begin with an architectural view of the standard reference NFV platform and present our taxonomy of existing NFV platforms based on the principal purpose of design. Then we thoroughly explore the design space and elaborate on the implementation choices each platform opts for. We believe that our study gives a detailed guideline for network operators or service providers to choose or implement the most appropriate NFV platforms based on their respective requirements. Note that this report serves as a complementary document for a published IEEE TNSM paper [1]. We will periodically update this document to include the newly proposed NFV platforms and design choices.