High available deployment of cloud-based virtualized network functions

Abstract

As Cloud technologies mature increasingly, more businesses tend to migrate their services towards Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms instead of dedicated data centers. Recently, even telecommunication providers consider moving their services to the Cloud despite the high demands regarding service quality. In order to deploy such critical services using mainstream Cloud management software, it must be hardened to deliver the required degree of availability and performance. In this paper we present a reliable deployment scheme for the Cloud software OpenStack with an IP Multimedia Subsystem on top simulating telecommunication services. We derived a top-down analysis approach to evaluate the deployed scheme in the context of typical carrier-grade service scenarios. Furthermore we identified the shortcomings of the system to fulfill the requirements of Virtualized Network Functions in terms of failure tolerance and recovery cost.