Multimedia Content Delivery with NFV: From the Energy Perspective

In today’s Internet, multimedia traffic accounts for the largest share of all traffic, highlighted by its volume, variety, multicast nature, and QoS constraints. Downstream towards consumers, multimedia traffic may traverse through middleboxes, undergoing additional data processing imposed by content providers and/or distributors. With the advent of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), middleboxes are progressively embedded in off-the-shelf, general-purpose servers. Despite the benefits, NFV may incur an undue amount of energy consumption when carrying out high packet forwarding performance. In this article, we investigate how switching to state-of-the-art NFV products for multimedia content delivery can result in significant energy costs. We identify the energy inefficiency issue in the NFV dataplane which can be exacerbated if not handle properly. We outline a power management framework that considers characteristics of multimedia traffic and exploits CPU frequency scaling to save energy.