NFV Series – Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), a disruption to the status quo

Stringent standards for protocol adherence and stability meant development of these hardware devices was slow but despite the time spent developing them the continual acceleration of hardware capabilities, as described by Moore’s law, meant they soon became obsolete. This resulted in operators continually having to repeat the cycle of design, integrate and deploy just to keep up with competitors. Not only is this expensive, it does little if anything to bring in additional revenue as customers come to expect the services offered by the new hardware platforms as standard.

A whitepaper produced by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in 2012 sought to characterise a more efficient network architecture paradigm: Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). NFV takes the functions that were being carried out on these dedicated hardware devices and creates virtual versions that can be ran as software on standard servers.

This diagram illustrates how multiple network functions and even entire network nodes, for example a Home Location Register (HLR) or eNode B, can be virtualised and ran on standard multi-purpose hardware, such as a multiple blade server. In this example VLAN #1 is dedicated to policy control and VLAN #3 is dedicated to traffic detection. In a non-NFV network architecture the constituent parts of these virtual LANs would each be a dedicated hardware platform but here they have been consolidated into software versions that have been grouped together to run on just a few multiple blade servers. This network architecture offers many advantages including:

Reduced capital expenditure (CAPEX)
Reduced operating expenditure (OPEX)
Reduced time to market (TTM) of new services
Reduced network complexity

This is the first in a series of blog posts dedicated to NFV, the next blog post in this series will examine the benefits of an NFV network architecture in more detail. If you’re interested in adopting an NFV network architecture to reduce both CAPEX and OPEX within your network why not contact us to find out how we can help?