Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey
Open accessAbstract
Diverse proprietary network appliances increase both the capital and operational expense of service providers, meanwhile causing problems of network ossification. Network function virtualization (NFV) is proposed to address these issues by implementing network functions as pure software on commodity and general hardware. NFV allows flexible provisioning, deployment, and centralized management of virtual network functions. Integrated with SDN, the software-defined NFV architecture further offers agile traffic steering and joint optimization of network functions and resources. This architecture benefits a wide range of applications (e.g., service chaining) and is becoming the dominant form of NFV. In this survey, we present a thorough investigation of the development of NFV under the software-defined NFV architecture, with an emphasis on service chaining as its application. We first introduce the software-defined NFV architecture as the state of the art of NFV and present relationships between NFV and SDN. Then, we provide a historic view of the involvement from middlebox to NFV. Finally, we introduce significant challenges and relevant solutions of NFV, and discuss its future research directions by different application domains.
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As the adoption of SDN and NFV matures towards future 5G networks, the software-defined NFV architecture can offer an active traffic steering and joint optimization of network functions that further turns into QoE-management offerings.
“As the adoption of SDN and NFV matures towards future 5G networks, the software-defined NFV architecture [256] can offer an active traffic steering and joint optimization of network functions that further turns into QoE-management offerings [257].”
From QoE Management of Multimedia Streaming Services in Future Networks: A Tutorial and Survey (2020) · cites this paper as [256]
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Rahman, A., Islam, M. J., Sunny, F. A., & Nasir, M. K. (2019) · 2019 2nd International Conference on Innovation in Engineering and Technology (ICIET) · doi:10.1109/iciet48527.2019.9290627 · Cited by 40 · see citing works
- Authors
- Li, Y., & Chen, M.
- Affiliations
- Tsinghua University (CN)
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology (CN)
- Venue
- IEEE Access
- Published
- 2015
- Volume
- 3
- Pages
- 2542-2553
- ISSN
- 2169-3536 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2203584209
- Cited by
- 508
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 60 · 2020: 94 · 2019: 83 · 2018: 64 · 2017: 61 · 2016: 27
- FWCI
- 58.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- IEEE Access (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (2013CB329105)
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (61300224, 61301080, 61171065, 61273214, 91338203, 91338102)
- International Science and Technology Collaboration Program through the Ministry of Science and Technology, China, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (2014DFT10070, 61572220)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Software-Defined Networks and 5G
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Electrical and Electronic Engineering › Advanced Optical Network Technologies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cloud Computing and Resource Management
- Keywords
- network function virtualization, software-defined networking, service function chaining, middleboxes, commodity hardware, traffic steering
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