NFV-Throttle: An Overload Control Framework for Network Function Virtualization

Network function virtualization (NFV) aims to provide high-performance network services through cloud computing and virtualization technologies. However, network overloads represent a major challenge. While elastic cloud computing can partially address overloads by scaling on-demand, this mechanism is not quick enough to meet the strict high-availability requirements of “carrier-grade” telecom services. Thus, in this paper we propose a novel overload control framework (NFV-Throttle) to protect NFV services from failures due to an excess of traffic in the short term, by filtering the incoming traffic toward virtual network functions (VNFs) to make the best use of the available capacity, and to preserve the QoS of traffic flows admitted in the network. Moreover, the framework has been designed to fit the service models of NFV, including VNFaaS and NFVIaaS. We present an extensive experimental evaluation on the NFV-oriented Clearwater IMS, showing that the solution is robust and able to sustain severe overload conditions with a very small performance overhead.