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

Mobile cellular networks and content delivery, especially video content delivery can be greatly benefitted by NFV (Network functions virtualization) because

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

Network functions virtualization (NFV) typical multi-layer network architecture consists of core, aggregation and access layers .This hierarchical structure of Points of Presence (PoPs) has important consequences for the optimal placement and sizes of datacenters. For a video delivery service for example, allocating storage in the core layer datacenters allows serving a broad range of users from a limited number of storage sites, but incurs a huge amount of backhaul traffic, while placing storage at the access layer requires multiple smaller storage sites but minimizes the network load. The optimal allocation of datacenters in a hierarchical network topology thus boils down to finding the best balance between distributing the datacenters at increased infrastructure cost and centralizing the datacenters with increased load on the network links.