By Jeff DeMent, Erich Arnold, and Mircea Orban, Arris Group
Service providers around the world are embracing Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) as enabling technologies to help increase service velocity and reduce costs. While some network functions may be suitable for deployment in a centralized data center, others (such as content caching and distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) detection and mitigation) are most effectively deployed at the network edge in order to meet the necessary latency targets and avoid degrading the user’s quality of experience. This paper explores the concept of an Edge Resource Center, a small-scale virtual machine infrastructure (VMI) co-located with the CCAP devices in a cable head-end that supports high availability and high capacity SDN/NFV resources.