Traffic-Aware Deployment of Interdependent NFV Middleboxes in Software-Defined Networks

OF THE DISSERTATION TRAFFIC AWARE DEPLOYMENT OF INTERDEPENDENT NFV MIDDLEBOXES IN SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKS by Wenrui Ma Florida International University, 2018 Miami, Florida Professor Deng Pan, Major Professor Middleboxes, such as firewalls, Network Address Translators (NATs), Wide Area Network (WAN) optimizers, or Deep Packet Inspectors (DPIs), are widely deployed in modern networks to improve network security and performance. Traditional middleboxes are typically hardware based, which are expensive and closed systems with little extensibility. Furthermore, they are developed by different vendors and deployed as standalone devices with little scalability. As the development of networks in scale, the limitations of traditional middleboxes bring great challenges in middlebox deployments. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology provides a promising alternative, which enables flexible deployment of middleboxes, as virtual machines (VMs) running on standard servers. However, the flexibility also creates a challenge for efficiently placing such middleboxes, due to the availability of multiple hosting servers, capabilities of middleboxes to change traffic volumes, and dependency between middleboxes. In our first two work, we addressed the optimal placement challenge of NFV middleboxes by considering middlebox traffic changing effects and dependency relations. Since each VM has only a limited processing capacity restricted by its available resources, multiple instances of the same function are necessary in an NFV network. Thus, routing in an NFV network is also a challenge to determine not only