Building an NFV-Based vRGW: lessons learned

Authors

Abstract

The residential gateway (RGW) is a widely deployed device in the context of telecommunication services such as triple play and internet access. Designed to make the connection between the customer home and the operator infrastructure, it provides wired and/or wireless connectivity capabilities, also handling services such as Domain Name Service (DNS) proxying, routing, Network Address Translation (NAT) or firewalling, among others. Its increased complexity, together with other factors – such as device-related costs, or the increased reliance on RGWs for providing critical services – has prompted an interest in its virtualization, also motivated by the evolution of network and service-centric virtualization concepts. This paper presents an approach for the virtualization of the residential gateway (vRGW). It starts by giving an overview of the concept, explaining it and pointing out its benefits. It also explains the virtualization techniques and paradigms that have pushed this movement, namely software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and service function chaining (SFC). Additionally, it describes the implementation of the vRGW architecture, including a description of its components and their integration.

Keywords

Software-Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, Virtual RGW, Service Function Chaining

Related Project

H2020 ATENA (Advanced Tools to assEss and mitigate the criticality of ICT compoNents and their dependencies over Critical InfrAstructures)

Conference

14th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC 2017), January 2017

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DOI