1. SDN
SDN general function: SDN can further strengthen the flexible management and control of mobile communication networks. The
core idea of SDN: separate the data plane and control plane in network equipment, and program the control plane. This facilitates the abstraction of the underlying network resources and the centralized management of the network view, and provides services for the upper application plane in the form of virtual resources.
Data plane: Mainly responsible for data processing, forwarding and collection of status information. The main equipment is the switch, including physical switches and virtual switches.
Control plane: It is mainly responsible for controlling the data plane decision-making and network management. The control plane is mainly composed of SDN controllers, which can obtain global network information, and can perform global deployment and optimization of network information according to business needs, such as traffic scheduling, Load balancing. The protocol can be issued to the data plane through the southbound interface.
Application plane: It mainly includes SDN-related applications, and the northbound interface interacts with the control plane.
2. NFV
General functions of NFV: NFV can further improve the resource utilization of network infrastructure. With the continuous growth of network services and businesses, there are more and more special functions of special equipment in the network, and a single device can only perform a specific function , It will cause problems such as single function, poor openness and functionality, and low resource utilization in the network. NFV technology is to solve this type of problem.
Operation support and business support system (OSS/BSS), mainly responsible for the management of network services and businesses.
Virtual Network Function (VNF) is the software implementation of network functions. It runs on NFVI and can configure multiple function instances on the same hardware device or in the same virtual environment.
The Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) provides virtual computing, storage and network resources for the VNF, and provides a system environment for the deployment, management and execution of the VNF.
Network function virtualization management and orchestration (NFV MANO) is mainly responsible for the organization and management of NFVI's physical and virtual resources, as well as the management of the life cycle of VNF.
Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM), which is mainly responsible for monitoring and management of
VNFI ; VNF Manager (VNFM), which is mainly responsible for the management of VNF instances, including the creation of virtualized resources and life cycle management;
NFV scheduler (NFVO) ), mainly responsible for the life cycle management of network services and corresponding strategies.
3. The connection between SDN and NFV
NFV: Decoupling hardware and software, freeing the network from proprietary hardware and allowing it to run on common virtual devices. What is achieved is the pooling of network resources. NFV is mainly to optimize the functions of the network, such as load balancing, firewall, WAN network optimization controller and other
SDN: Separate the control plane and the data plane, which can realize the flexible deployment, management, monitoring and scheduling of the network, and realize the flexible scheduling of traffic. That is to say, the management and scheduling of network resources are realized. SDN is mainly to optimize the network infrastructure architecture, such as Ethernet switches, routers and wireless networks.
For the OSI seven-layer model, SDN mainly deals with the data link layer and network layer, while NFV mainly deals with the transport layer, session layer, presentation layer, and application layer.