Design and implementation of multi-cloud VNFs deployment utilizing lightweight LXC virtualization

With the upcoming digital industrial revolution, the telecommunications industry has been looking for ways to become more efficient. This involves maintaining or improving its performance at a lower operational cost. This need is also aided by the fact that the industry has been experiencing declining profitability. This has resulted in the industry looking at solutions like virtualization and resource pooling or cloudification among others. Recent studies have concluded on container-based virtualization for better performance. However, there are different container providers and choosing a less performant provider increases deployment costs. Additionally, to foster sustainability and adoption of the virtualization, its management and orchestration (MANO) needs to conform to the ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute) network function virtualization (NFV) MANO standards. Hence, this paper designs and implements an ETSI complaint NFV MANO for container-based virtualization using the most performant container provider, LXC. In order to cater for horizontal scaling and distributed services, we promptly incorporate multi-host, multi-cloud in the design.