PDNI: A Distributed Framework for NFV Infrastructure

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an attempt to help operators more effectively manage their networks by implementing traditional network functions embedded in specialized hardware platforms in term of virtualized software instances. And, existing NFV infrastructure solutions are always architected on a general-purpose x86 server, which makes the performance of NFs limited by the hosted single server. However, this implementation may limit the performance of software network functions within a single server. This approach is inflexible and unsuitable for being extended with the trend of increasing sprawl when a NF is beyond the capability of a simple server. To address this challenge, we present Pooled Distributed Networking Infrastructure (PDNI for short), a distributed framework for NFV infrastructure that explores the way of consolidating multiple physical servers into a unified logical platform. By this, software network functions on PDNI could be transparently scaled onto more than one server to break up upper capability limit.