An SDN/NFV Platform for Personal Cloud Services

In the last few years, network “softwarization” is gaining increasing popularity to achieve dynamicity and flexibility. Cloud computing, as well as the new paradigms of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), are supporting this evolution. However, the need to move services closer to users to guarantee low latency in the service fruition on one hand, and the trend to support personalization of services on the other, are stimulating the migration of services toward edge nodes (in the so-called “fog computing” fashion). This is the target of the INPUT platform, proposed in the INPUT project to support Future Internet personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way, and with innovative added-value capabilities. The INPUT platform enables next-generation cloud applications to go beyond classical service models, and even replaces physical Smart Devices, usually placed in users’ homes (e.g., set-top-boxes, etc.), with virtual entities, providing them to users “as a Service.” In this paper, we present the INPUT paradigm and discuss a relevant use case – namely, the virtual Set-Top-Box – adopted to prove the feasibility of the softwarized SDN/NFV paradigm jointly with the fog-computing approach for the support of personal cloud services. The INPUT platform is also compared with a legacy approach to evaluate the gain in terms of quality of experience (QoE) for both static and mobile users.