Question

“Mobile cellular networks and content delivery, especially video content delivery can be greatly benefitted by NFV”. Illustrate the statement with appropriate examples.

Answer 1

Network functions virtualization (NFV) enables IT pros to modernize their networks with modular software running on standard server platforms.

Over time, NFV will deliver high-performance networks with greater scalability, elasticity, and adaptability at reduced costs compared to networks built from traditional networking equipment. NFV covers a wide range of network applications, but is driven primarily by new network requirements, including video, SD-WAN, Internet of Things and 5G.

the goal of NFV is to transform the way that network operators architect networks by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types on to industry standard high-volume servers, switches and storage, which could be located in the data center, in the network or at end-customer premises. NFV replaces traditional, custom-designed network equipment (black boxes) that continues to dominate the installed base of networks.

NFV Use Cases

NFV is applicable across a wide range of network functions, including fixed and mobile networks. Some leading NFV applications include:

• Evolved Packet Core (EPC)
• Software-Defined Branch and SD-WAN
• IP Multi-Media Subsystem (IMS)
• Session Border Control (SBC)
• Video Servers
• Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE)
• Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
• Network Monitoring
• Network Slicing
• Service Delivery
• A variety of security functions – firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, NAT, etc.

Benefits

NFV promises a number of benefits to network operators, including:

• Reduce costs in purchasing network equipment via migration to software on standard servers
• Efficiencies in space, power, and cooling
• Faster time to deployment
• Flexibility – elastic scale up and scale down of capacity
• Access to a broad independent software community, including open source

Video Analytics

The technology that has seen a huge increase in its potential, since the inception of the Internet of Things, is video analytics systems and software. Now, companies are able to capture massive amounts of data using IoT video and smart devices installed in their factories, stores, offices, and even farms.

But most of the time, high-performance AI video analysis is performed only cloud-native applications or powerful servers located on the cloud. So having to transfer these large amounts of data for analysis from on-premises to the cloud becomes a real challenge. The modern network usually faces an end-to-end network latency, which poses a real challenge for the apps and network services that are extremely sensitive to network delays, such as video analytics.

In order to solve this challenge, enterprises have been turning to NFV and SDN architectures to reduce network resource utilization and improve latency. These technologies could when combined with using video analytics at the network edge, reduce bandwidth use by up to 90% according to some proposals.

An example of this video analytics technology is a device like the NVA-3000 from Lanner. This device is an Enterprise-grade NVR for video surveillance/machine vision. Together with a low-latency network such as LTE or 5G, an NVR can gather video from multiple input channels such as video surveillance, it buffers it, pre-processes it and sends it over the network. The VNF provider sends network functions on-demand to the network edge.

Example;

5G Networks

The increasing consumption of multimedia services and the demand of high-quality services from customers has triggered a fundamental change in how we administer networks in terms of abstraction, separation, and mapping of forwarding, control and management aspects of services. The industry and the academia are embracing 5G as the future network capable to support next generation vertical applications with different service requirements. To realize this vision in 5G network, the physical network has to be sliced into multiple isolated logical networks of varying sizes and structures which are dedicated to different types of services based on their requirements with different characteristics and requirements (e.g., a slice for massive IoT devices, smartphones or autonomous cars, etc.). Softwarization using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)in 5G networks are expected to fill the void of programmable control and management of network resources.