NFV Orchestrator Placement for Geo-Distributed Systems

Abstract: The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) developed Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Management and Orchestration (MANO) framework. Within that framework, NFV orchestrator (NFVO) and Virtualized Network Function (VNF) Manager (VNFM) functional blocks are responsible for managing the lifecycle of network services and their associated VNFs. However, they face significant scalability and performance challenges in large-scale and geo-distributed NFV systems. Their number and location have major implications for the number of VNFs that can be accommodated and also for the overall system performance. NFVO and VNFM placement is therefore a key challenge due to its potential impact on the system scalability and performance. In this paper, we address the placement of NFVO and VNFM in large-scale and geo-distributed NFV infrastructure. We provide an integer linear programming formulation of the problem and propose a two-step placement algorithm to solve it. We also conduct a set of experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm.