Dependability Certification Guidelines for NFVIs through Fault Injection

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging networking paradigm that offers new ways of creating, deploying, and managing networking services, by turning physical network functions into virtualized one. The NFV paradigm heavily relies on cloud computing and virtualization technologies to provide carrier-grade services. The certification process of NFV systems is an open and critical question to ensure that the delivered network service provides specific guarantees about performance and dependability. In this paper, we propose potential guidelines for evaluating the reliability of NFV Infrastructures (NFVIs), with the aim of verifying whether NFVIs satisfy its reliability and performance requirements even in presence of faults. The guidelines are described as a set of key practices to be followed, in terms of inputs, activities, and outputs. These practices are intended to be conducted by companies that want to evaluate the reliability of their NFVI against quantitative performance, availability, and fault tolerance objectives, and to get precise feedback on how to improve its fault tolerance.