NSPlacer: A Tool for Evaluating Service Placement Algorithms in Post-5G Networks

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been a prominent shift from dedicated network devices towards reusable Virtual Network Functions (VNF). Today’s network services are defined as a graph of VNFs connected via Virtual Links (VL), which are realized by placing its elements on their corresponding substrate network nodes and links. Efficient placement of the network services is one of the most important challenges introduced by NFV. We propose a demonstration of the "Network Service Placer (NSPlacer)", a tool to enable the evaluation of the placement algorithms. By being able to adjust various parameters, related to the substrate network, the service and the placement algorithm, and thanks to the already implemented interesting placement algorithms, our online tool can provide near-optimal and optimal results to serve as a comparison with many placement solutions. Made available to the community, our tool aims to contribute to the reproducibility of the research results by offering a set of reference algorithms to which everyone can compare their solution and even integrate it into the set of available algorithms of the tool.