NFV on the one hand offers many advantages, simplification, innovative approaches to networking functions and on the other hand, opens up an endless amount of use cases, which are more or less useful in the real network traffic.
Nevertheless, currently we can say that NFV is not a separate fully workable solution, even the ETSI organization develops continuous efforts to create a strong unified NFV standard. NFV is idea to profit from virtualization, what approach will be taken for the provision of network functionalities and how to manage and orchestrate it all.
Web portal SDxCentral annually publishes a comprehensive report called Network Functions Virtualization Report [18], which includes the main idea of NFV, its evolution, and overview of Vendors delivering NFV solution as well as most beneficial use cases listed below.
Nowadays, well-functioning cloud already offers many opportunities how to easily, flexibly and quickly distribute or develop applications, infrastructure or platforms. Virtualized Network Functions are being adapted to fully respect the already existing method in the world of cloud. For Cloud Service providers is most attractive the provision of virtual routing, virtual private network (VPN), layer 4-7 acceleration and security services to help them connect, scale and protect their cloud-based applications.
This use case is particularly important for Mobile Service Providers who are looking for ways to simplify and accelerate the creation of new radio access networks (RANs), while controlling the costs. A number of functionalities that run on proprietary hardware located in a base station may be moved onto virtual machine or set of virtual machines that could operate locally on COTS servers, on an aggregation point or in the cloud.
Mobile operators are often faced with tasks of upgrading their networks, services and also to extend their services to rural areas which are hard to reach. Use case lies in taking the functions from proprietary hardware in mobile core and putting them on COTS servers in a cloud environment. Mobile operators are mainly looking for the following services to have virtualized: IMS, EPC, MME, S-GW, P-GW, HSS and PCRF.
Service providers are also trying to find an easy solution how to simplify their edge, which incorporates Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) and Customer Edge (CE), to sell more services to both consumer and business customers. NFV can be a possible solution to grow their revenues. For enabling the NFV in service provider’s world, it is necessary to have virtualized edge components - vCPE and vCE.