A Web-Based Traffic Steering and Orchestration Platform for NFV Services

Traditionally a Service Function Chain (SFC) consists of a set of dedicated network service boxes such as firewall, load balancers, and application delivery controllers that are concatenated together to support a specific service. With a new service, new devices must be installed and interconnected in certain order. This can be a very complex, time-consuming, and error-prone process, requiring careful planning of topology changes and network outages and incurring high OPEX. Through network function virtualization (NFV) service, carriers and service providers can dynamically create virtual environment for a specific SFC and eliminate the complex hardware and labor work.
While AWS (Amazon Web Service) is a big success in cloud services, there are few customer-driven platforms for NFV that provide the synergy of cloud services, core networks, and edge resources. In this project, we propose to develop an orchestration and traffic steering platform that allows customers to setup their service function chains dynamically through web. These SFCs will be deployed over the infrastructures operated by network and service providers automatically with elastic and optimal resource usage.

Faculty Supervisor:

Changcheng Huang;Chung-Horng Lung

Student:

Qiao Lu;Amir Aghasharif;Abdullah Bittar;Sameh Ibrahim

Partner:

Ciena Corp.

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Information and cultural industries

University:

Carleton University