CS Researchers Awarded Best Paper at IEEE NFV-SDN

12-07-2015

Writer(s): Staff Reports

Researchers from the Purdue Computer Science Department, Hewlett-Packard Labs and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise were awarded "Best Paper" at the first IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (IEEE NFV-SDN), a new conference on the emerging areas of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV).

These two emerging areas are generating considerable excitement among Internet Service Providers (ISPs), because they significantly reduce their operational costs by simplifying network management.

The paper titled "NFV-VITAL: A Framework for Characterizing the Performance of Virtual Network Functions" was co-authored by Ph.D. student Lianjie Cao with his advisor, Professor Sonia Fahmy, in collaboration with Dr. Puneet Sharma from Hewlett-Packard Labs and Vinay Saxena from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

Lianjie Cao was surprised to be presented with the award at the opening session of the conference on Wednesday, November 18th, 2015, in San Francisco, California.  The paper was the only best paper awardee. It was selected from 25 papers presented at the conference during eight technical sessions.

NFV-VITAL characterizes the impact of hardware and virtualization options on the virtual network function (VNF) performance, and on the load on underlying infrastructure.  The authors used NFV-VITAL to study three sample open-source VNF platforms, the Clearwater Multimedia VNF and two intrusion detection system VNFs (Snort and Suricata).  The authors demonstrated how NFV-VITAL can automatically determine optimal configurations under different workloads with the three sample VNFs.