Quality audit and resource brokering for network functions virtualization (NFV) orchestration in hybrid clouds

Technical and economic opportunities of cloud computing become the focus for Internet applications and at the same time also for telco support infrastructures and network services. In fact, many telco providers are consolidating their service infrastructures towards converged and all-IP next generation networks providing typical telco services within LTE (and soon 5G) and also fixed network environments, e.g., often still adopting IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture solutions. This telco service infrastructure evolution requires a significant upfront investment in the necessary hardware and software, thereby slowing down the adoption process significantly more than any other Internet application. Cloud computing applied to telco infrastructures can allow pay-per-use business models and significantly lower investment risks by providing telco infrastructure functionality as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform. For this purpose we propose a quality audit and resource brokering framework that is fully NFV-compliant. Its current and reported implementation specifically targets IMS services because of the still relevant role played by IMS in converged provisioning and the wide availability of IMS deployment testbeds to validate the proposal. In particular, the proposed solution can monitor the quality offered by VNFs and scale in/out depending on dynamic requirements; it is fully based on industrial standards and open-source reference implementations, thus enabling rapid adoption in real industrial environments.