Quality-aware Analysis and Optimisation of Virtual Network Functions

<p><strong>To watch it in Youtube:</strong></p> <p><a href="https://youtu.be/RGwIVCgANcU">https://youtu.be/RGwIVCgANcU</a></p> <p><strong>This is the live presentation of a conference paper. Please, access and cite the published version:</strong></p> <p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3546932.3547007">https://doi.org/10.1145/3546932.3547007</a></p> <p>The softwarisation and virtualisation of network functionality is the last milestone in the networking industry. <em>Software-Defined Networks</em> (SDN) and <em>Network Function Virtualization</em> (NFV) offer the possibility of using software to manage computer and mobile networks and build novel <em>Virtual Network Functions</em> (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.</p> <p>However, this domain imposes certain challenges to quality-aware reasoning of service function chains, such as numerical features or configuration-level <em>Quality Attributes</em> (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.</p>