REARM: Renewable energy based resilient deployment of Virtual Network Functions

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is becoming more prevalent in Data Center, Telecommunication and Enterprise networks, enabling the Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to fast replace the traditional dedicated hardware based middleboxes. Ensuring high availability and fault tolerance of VNFs is cardinal to meet the performance and service level agreement requirements. Also, with the increasing electricity demands in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, especially for the data centers, the inclination towards employing renewable (green) resources to power up the data centers is also increasing. Mitigating the carbon footprint and curbing the energy costs have been the driving factors for push towards employing the green energy resources. However, the Green energy supply is rather intermittent and unstable. In this work, we study the impact of deploying VNFs in Green Data Centers (GDCs) and make a case for addressing the VNF reliability and high availability to effectively tackle the stability concerns of GDC. To this extent, we present REARM, which adopts the concept of Transient VNFs that rely on a very short advance warning time to seamlessly migrate the VNFs from GDC to a more reliable and stable Data Centers (SDCs). Our experiments with container based VNFs demonstrate that adaptive state transfer mechanism results into significant reduction in both computation and communication overheads for maintaining the NF replica, and warning time of 30ms is sufficient to failover VNFs (serving 1K flows) within a data center to ensure high availability of NFV services.