Requirements and design of flexible NFV network infrastructure node leveraging SDN/OpenFlow

Carrier network service infrastructures are becoming increasingly complex since thousands of service-specific hardware-based network nodes are implemented to support a wide variety of network services. This has resulted in critically high increases in the maintenance costs to ensure service quality for network services and the deployment costs for new network services. Addressing these problems requires new ways to simplify and automate operations and infrastructures. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN)/OpenFlow are attractive concepts that address these problems. In this study we present the requirements and a basic design of a flexible and elastic network service infrastructure with NFV and SDN/OpenFlow. We also introduce a virtual BRAS (Broadband Remote Access Server) prototype using Intel DPDK as high performance throughputs.