Improving Seamless VNF State Migration
13 January 2016
The shift to virtualized network functions allows for new opportunities in elastic and dynamic traffic management. However, the (partial) migration of VNF instances and their state (including split and merge) bears the risk of jitter and packet loss during the migration process. Previous work has been trying to mitigate these problems with techniques like packet replication, which incur significant additional costs. Our work proposes a novel framework that mitigates the costs of VNF state migration by only replicating information necessary to update the state rather than replicated data packets. Moreover, our solution avoids packet loss or out-of-order packets by the state migration while only causing a minimum jitter.
