Fine-Grained Resource-Aware Virtual Network Function Management for 5G Carrier Cloud

This article proposes an approach that enables a cloud infrastructure MANO entity, in a virtualized infrastructure (e.g., a data center) that hosts virtualized networks and services, to derive the affinity scores for the plurality of resource units with reference to a specific resource unit for each individual virtual machine instance. This affinity score, referred to as the reference resource affinity score, will enable a MANO entity to perform precise and efficient resource tailoring or dimensioning, and hence will optimize its decisions and actions related to the operations and management of the virtualized systems inside the cloud infrastructure. The proposed approach is particularly of vital importance for the management of virtual network functions that are chained to create network services as part of the carrier cloud concept, an important vision of the future 5G architecture.