Automated Generation of Availability Models for SFCs: the Case of Virtualized IP Multimedia Subsystem

The reputation of network providers strongly depends on their ability to guarantee high performance levels of virtualized infrastructures, and to maintain strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, thus, the concept of "five nines" or high availability (HA) is critical. It means that, on average, the continuity of a provided service cannot be violated for more than about five minutes per year. In this direction, we propose a framework useful to design and model, from a HA perspective, the Service Function Chains (SFCs) whose chained software logic is embodied in many softwarized telco infrastructures (e.g. IP Multimedia Subsystem elected here as a representative use case). The proposed framework interacts with TimeNET tool, and offers interesting functionalities such as: i) generating stochastic models of SFCs based on the SRN (Stochastic Reward Nets) formalism; ii) deploying network scenarios via drag-and-drop operations for basic users, or modifying the underlying SRN models for advanced users; iii) setting a variety of parameters (mean-time-to-failure/repair, software/hardware specs, redundancy, etc.); iv) presenting availability results in tabular and/or graphical forms.