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An Extended Virtual Network Functions Manager Architecture to Support Container

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that decouples network functions from hardware. With NFV, virtual network functions (VNFs) can easily be instantiated and deployed on standard servers using virtual machines (VMs). To facilitate VNFs' deployment and management, Tacker is developed as a NFV manager (NFVM) and orchestrator (NFVO) in OpenStack environments. Recently, container is proposed as a promising virtualization technology for deploying and running distributed applications without launching an entire VM for each application, which helps increase cloud agility and accelerate the deployments of cloud technologies and VNFs. Unfortunately, the current VNF manager and orchestrator, Tacker, do not support container-based VNFs, thus introduces limitations to integrate container-based VNFs to the current NFV infrastructure (NFVI). In this paper, we design an extended Tacker architecture to support managing and orchestrating container-based VNFs. The Kubernetes cluster is integrated to support launching container-based VNFs and provide high availability for VNFs. Through test-bed results, we show the advantages of container-based VNFs using our architecture compared to VM-based VNFs in terms of instantiation time in Tacker.