Implementation of a real-time network traffic monitoring service with network functions virtualization

The Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) extends the functionality provided by Software-Defined Networking (SDN). It is a virtualization technology that aims to replace the functionality provided by traditional networking hardware using software solutions. Thereby, enabling cheaper and efficient network deployment and management. The use of NFV and SDN is anticipated to enhance the performance of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. However, due to the presence of a large number of network devices in laaS clouds offering a plethora of networked services, there is need to develop a traffic monitoring system for the efficient network. This paper proposes and validates an extensible SDN and NFV-enabled network traffic monitoring system. Using extensive experiments, we show that the proposed system can closely match the performance of traditional networks at cheaper costs and by adding more flexibility to network management tasks. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.