Providing cognitive components with a bidding heuristic for emergent NFV orchestration

Network function virtualisation (NFV) decouples network functions from the underlying hardware by means of virtualisation, thus enabling the replacement of proprietary middleboxes by software components that can be dynamically deployed and configured on demand. The selection of the most appropriate virtual network functions (VNFs) to achieve a particular objective, and the decision on where to deploy these VNFs and through which paths they will communicate, are the responsibilities of an NFV orchestrator. In this paper, we propose to orchestrate VNFs using interacting cognitive components structured with the BDI architecture, leading to emergent solu­tions to address network challenges. More specifically, we extend a previously proposed reverse auction protocol and propose a novel bidding heuristic that can be used to make decisions regarding the orchestration tasks. We validate our model in a DDoS attack case study, in which we demonstrate that our components can successfully mitigate the attack.