Multimedia Content Delivery with Network Function Virtualization: The Energy Perspective

Multimedia now accounts for the largest share of all Internet traffic, highlighted by its volume, variety, multicast nature, and QoS constraints. Downstream toward consumers, multimedia traffic can traverse through middleboxes, undergoing additional data processing imposed by content providers and distributors. With the advent of network function virtualization (NFV), middleboxes are progressively embedded in off-the-shelf, general-purpose servers. Despite the benefits, NFV can incur an undue amount of energy consumption during high packet forwarding. In this article, the authors investigate how switching to state-of-the-art NFV products for multimedia content delivery can result in significant energy costs. They identify energy inefficiency in the NFV data plane, which can be exacerbated if not handled properly. They outline a power management framework that considers characteristics of multimedia traffic and exploits CPU frequency scaling to save energy. This article is part of a special issue on advancing multimedia distribution.