Robustness and High Availability
The following mechanisms are considered:
- Infrastructure, Hypervisor and Cloud Control Reliability, comparing the Virtual Machines (VM) and virtual network with infrastructure resources management.
- Orchestrator Reliability, for fault recovery and root cause analysis generic to the VNFs.
- Virtual Network Function (VNF) Reliability in the VMs - OS functionality ensuring reliability transparent to the VNF functions
- Reliability at Virtual Service Level – current explicit reliability mechanisms (pools, offloading, …)

Fraunhofer FOKUS
For robustness on the virtualization enabler, the design of the appropriate forwarding nodes needs to support:
- Load balancing (with the specific protocols/with different policies)
- High availability operations, like distribution of state information and immediate reaction to faults.
- Support for proxy nodes in edge cloud processing and with intermittent backhaul.