Towards successful VoLTE and VoWiFi deployment: network function virtualization solutions’ benefits and challenges

The Recent decades have witnessed intensive efforts from operators to implement methods enabling better control over network utilization, service usage, and service monetization. Nevertheless, they report significant growth in Diameter signaling traffic, especially policy management signaling traffic. More specifically, operators offering long term evolution (LTE) data-only services and planning for a massive introduction of voice over LTE (VoLTE) and voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) services need to tackle the enormous growth in Diameter signaling traffic. The biggest challenge for those operators is to find an appropriate solution, scalable enough to handle the unpredictable growth of Diameter signaling traffic; as the VoLTE and VoWiFi services will reshape the landscape of LTE policies. Throughout this paper, we propose a network function virtualization (NFV) based model, mature enough to tackle the challenges of those operators planning to launch VoLTE and VoWiFi, without impacting existing services and without jeopardizing current revenues. In our approach we first used standard VoLTE and VoWiFi message flow and referenced users' behavior; then we considered NFV architecture characteristics. We finally referred to the latest experiments and test results related to NFV maturity cycle.