NetEye: Network Monitoring for a Software Defined Network based Virtualized Network Functions Platform

Abstract

With the introduction of Virtualized Network Functions Virtualization (VNFs), Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) allocate resources and deploy network functions as virtualized entities in the cloud. With the dynamic changes in the traffic and workload, initially allocated resources have to be increased or decreased to maintain the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Therefore, CSPs rely on network monitoring approaches to maintain an effective and efficient resource management process. However, the monitoring process itself creates an overhead to the performance of the network. Monitoring algorithms consume the CPU and memory resources of the cloud infrastructure during their execution. Therefore, selecting an appropriate monitoring approach is important, especially in a resource-constrained network. In this research, we have explored two monitoring approaches: continuous and periodic, and compared their performances in terms of memory and CPU utilization.