One document matched: draft-lee-vhs-ps-00.txt
TBD Y. Lee
Internet-Draft Comcast
Intended status: Informational R. Ghai
Expires: August 18, 2014 Benu Networks
February 14, 2014
Problem Statements of Virtualizing Home Services
draft-lee-vhs-ps-00
Abstract
Network Virtualization is proven a success to more effectively manage
services in data center. This draft states the motivations and
problem statements of decoupling services from Customer Premises
Equipment (CPE) and virtualizing them in the Network Service Provider
(NSP).
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on August 18, 2014.
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Internet-Draft Virtualizing Home Services February 2014
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Table of Contents
1. Home CPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. CPE Deployment Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Network Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. High-level Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Home CPE
In the early days of Internet era, most users used dial-up directly
connecting to Internet from desktop Personal Computer (PC). Network
Service Provider (NSP) offered a single public IPv4 address to the
dial-up (i.e., PPP) connection to the PC. This model was revised
when Internet and PC became more popular. Multiple PCs would share a
single NSP connection. NSP wanted to preserve the model to offer
only a single public IPv4 address per connection, NAT [RFC2663]
enabled Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) was introduced in home
network. When days advance, NSP are offering more and more IP
services (e.g., video, voice, home automation), NSPs must provide
seamless support and excellent services to their users. Today CPEs
are doing more than just NAT-ing. They may include but not limited
to the following services:
o IPv4 NAT Services
o DHCPv4 Server Service
o Personal Firewall Services
o Parental Control Service
o Voice over IP (VoIP) Service
o Home Monitor Service
o Video Streaming Service
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2. CPE Deployment Model
Although the current CPE deployment model is a by-product of limited
public IPv4 addresses, it is very successful and serves very well to
users. More importantly, NSP network has limited service capacity in
the network and the capacity isn't growing as fast as the user
demand. NSP can offload and distribute their services to the CPE so
that NSP can focus on growing bandwidth capacity. With all the CPE's
successes, there are also some drawbacks:
o No Uniform set of Services: There is no uniform set of services a
CPE vendor can build an one-for-all-NSP CPE. Each NSP may offer
slightly different set of services and hence each NSP may develop
its CPE specifications for CPE vendors to build.
o Service Variation: Even for a well defined service, each NSP may
still have different requirements. For example: NSP-A may use SIP
for its VoIP and NSP-B may use WebRTC.
o CPE Manageability: When an NSP plan to offer a new service that is
not compatible to the current CPE. The NSP must update or upgrade
the CPE. Depending on the NSP subscription base, it could mean to
update or upgrade thousands to millions of CPEs.
Among all three, CPE manageability is particularly critical to NSP.
Since the IPv4 addresses are depleted, IPv6 emigration has finally
started. One major advantage of IPv6 is network transparency. In
IPv4, NSP and Content Service Provider (CSP) can't identify a device
simply by examining just an IPv4 address because a public IPv4 may
represent multiple devices behind NAT. In IPv6, every device will
have one or more Global Unicast IPv6 addresses (GUA). This enables
NSP and CSP to offer device specific services. This inspires
innovation in services. For NSP, they may refine and evolve the
current "heavy" CPE deployment model to speed up offering new
services.
3. Network Virtualization
Software Defined Network (SDN) is originally designed to simplify and
rationalize data center deployment. One main goal is to virtualize
services from hardware. Service designers can focus on service
development without coupling to the underneath hardware architecture.
SDN provides a set of Application Programming Interface (API) for
service designers to interact with the hardware. There are two
critical criteria to make this concept possible: Fast network in data
center and Exponential growth of computation power in general
purposed hardware. SDN/Virtualization has been proven successful.
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Recently SDN has attracted researchers and network equipment vendors
to apply the same concept to core and edge network design and
development.
The success of SDN in data center also inspires serious
considerations by the NSP to apply the same concept to home services.
The basic idea is to move the current home services run in the CPE to
the NSP network. The CPE will focus on data plane function such as
Wifi and packet forwarding.
4. High-level Architecture
Similar to classic SDN architecture, virtualizing home services
include a Controller (Virtual CPE Controller) that hosts and
virtualizes home services and a Packet Processor (Virtual CPE Packet
Forwarder) that process packet forwarding. There exists an open API
between the Virtual CPE Controller (VC) and the Virtual CPE Packet
Forwarder (VDF) to exchange control plane information. Figure 1
shows the high-level architecture of virtualizing home services.
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------------------
/ NSP Provisioning /
/ System /
-------------------
||
|| Ia
|| +------------------------+
-------| +---+ +---+ +---+ |
| |vs1| |vs2| .... |vsN| |
---- | +---+ +---+ +---+ |
/CPE/==========\ | Virtual CPE Controller |
---- \ +---------------||-------+
\+-------------+ || Ib ///////////////
---- | Virtual CPE |=====|| / /
/CPE/ =============| Packet |====================/ Internet /
---- Ic | Forwarder | / /
/+-------------+ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
---- /
/CPE/=========/ vs - Virtual Service
---- Ia - Service Provisioning API
Ib - Service Activation API
Ic - Data Path Specification
Virtualizing Home Services High-Level Architecture Diagram
Figure 1
Virtual Service contains the service definitions and service logic.
For example: Virtual Service 1 (vs1) could be a parental control
service and manage web filter rules configured by subscriber.
Virtual Service 2 (vs2) could be personal firewall that protects a
home from botnet and intrusion. NSP can scale Virtual Service
horizontally to meet user demand. NSP can also dynamically create
Virtual Service per subscriber only when the subscriber wants that
service. For example: NSP initiates vs1 for User X and vs2 for User
Y. In this model, NSP no longer updates CPE for service addition or
modification.
Virtual CPE Controller (VC) stores the user's service subscription.
Each user may have different set of home services. For example: User
A may have video service. User B may have VoIP service. VC contains
the user's service subscription and interact with the Virtual Service
module to provide proper services to users. It contains a north-
bound API (Ia) to interact with NSP provisioning system.
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Virtual CPE Packet Forwarder (VPF) is usually a networking device
that is optimized for processing packet. It has a north-bound API
(Ib) to communicate to the VC.
CPE is a simple access device that connects to the subscriber's
devices at home to the NSP network.
Service Provisioning API is used between NSP provisioning system and
VC to communicate user's home service data such as service activation
and service specific parameters.
Service Activation API is used between VC and VPF to communicate data
plane policy such as QoS parameters and Access Control List (ACL)
rules.
Data Path Specification is the protocol agreed between CPE and VPF.
It could be Ethernet or any encapsulation technology such as PMIP or
MPLS.
5. Problem Statement
Virtualizing home services enables NSP to offer service in a more
rapid pace. It also enables NSP to offer new possible services such
as:
1. Connect a user mobile device to his home network at outdoor
access point.
2. Provide more flexibility IPv4 and IPv6 address management.
3. Provide more granular QoS management.
Section 4 describes the high-level architecture. One possible
deployment is to put the Virtual CPE Controller in a centralized
location and put the Virtual CPE Switch closer to users. This
deployment requires to standardize the following:
o Service Definition: Define the service semantics and user
interaction. This allows the vendor community to standardize the
service definition and build the Virtual Service model to support
it.
o Home Service Provisioning API (Ia): Define and specify the API to
provision the service to the Virtual CPE Controller for user and
service parameters.
o Home Service Activation API (Ib): Define and specify the API to
activate service policy in the data plane.
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Standardizing the Service Definition, Ia and Ib will simplify service
integration and equipment interoperability. This will help vendors
to speed up development and NSP to speed up new service offering.
6. Security Considerations
7. Conclusion
8. Acknowledgements
9. IANA Considerations
This memo includes no request to IANA.
10. References
10.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
10.2. Informative References
[RFC2663] Srisuresh, P. and M. Holdrege, "IP Network Address
Translator (NAT) Terminology and Considerations", RFC
2663, August 1999.
Authors' Addresses
Yiu L. Lee
Comcast
One Comcast Center
Philadelphia, PA 19103
U.S.A.
Email: yiu_lee@cable.comcast.com
URI: http://www.comcast.com
Rajat Ghai
Benu Networks
300 Concord Road, Suite 110
Billerica, MA 01821
U.S.A.
Email: rghai@benunets.com
URI: http://www.benunets.com
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