Proactive Failure Recovery for NFV in Distributed Edge Computing

Deploying NFV technologies to the edge networks has attracted growing attention in the stateof- the-art studies. In this article, we first review the most recent work on the topic of applying NFV to edge networks. Then, we identify that an urgent research challenge is to provide proactive failure recovery (shorten as failover hereafter) mechanism for the NFV-enabled distributed edge computing. To address this issue, we propose a novel management architecture that supports the proactive failover mechanism while provisioning NFV services in distributed edge computing. Simulation results show that the proposed proactive failover mechanism outperforms the reactive manner significantly in terms of latency spending on failover operations. We hope this article can spur deeper studies on the proactive intelligent resilience mechanism for deploying NFV in distributed edge computing and other related edge intelligence topics.