Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has increasingly gained importance to address some emerging networking challenges like agility and cost-effectiveness. NFV enables to run Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) on top of any generic, Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware, anytime and anywhere in the network. Specific service providers offer VNFs to prospective network providers. Service providers publish VNFs in dedicated marketplaces where network providers search VNFs and instantiate them according to a pre-established service-level agreement. On top of being proprietary and specific to the service providers, the existing VNF description models include details on VNF deployment but fail to fit VNF functional and non-functional specifications. This description alters an efficient selection of the most relevant VNFs and prevents full automation of the VNFs provisioning. This paper introduces a novel domain-independent VIrtualized networK functIoN ontoloGy (VIKING for short) for VNF description and publication in federated repositories. It also proposes a semantic-based matchmaking algorithm to discover and select the most relevant VNFs that satisfy prospective VNF consumers’ requests. As for validation, a prototype called Mastermyr Chest, including VIKING’s instantiation along with the matchmaker in Content Delivery Networks (CDN) domain was implemented. This prototype illustrates a new way to contribute to the redesign of the CDN’s traditional architecture by enabling value-added CDN service provisioning in an agile and dynamic manner. A set of experiments was run to (i) evaluate the matchmaker performances and (ii) demonstrate its accuracy and precision.

网络功能虚拟化（NFV）在解决诸如灵活性和成本效益之类的新兴网络挑战方面已变得越来越重要。NFV使您可以随时随地在网络上任何通用的现成商用（COTS）硬件之上运行虚拟化网络功能（VNF）。特定的服务提供商向潜在的网络提供商提供VNF。服务提供商在专用市场中发布VNF，网络提供商在其中根据预先建立的服务级别协议搜索VNF并将其实例化。现有的VNF描述模型除了具有专有性和针对服务提供商的专有性外，还包括有关VNF部署的详细信息，但不符合VNF的功能性和非功能性规范。此描述更改了最相关的VNF的有效选择，并阻止了VNF设置的完全自动化。本文介绍了一种新颖的独立于域的虚拟网络功能本体（简称VIKING），用于VNF描述和在联合存储库中的发布。它还提出了一种基于语义的匹配算法，以发现并选择最符合预期VNF消费者需求的VNF。至于验证，已实现了一个名为Mastermyr Chest的原型，其中包括VIKING的实例化以及Content Delivery Networks（CDN）域中的媒人。此原型说明了一种新方法，可通过以敏捷和动态的方式启用增值CDN服务供应来为CDN传统体系结构的重新设计做出贡献。进行了一组实验，以（i）评估媒人的表现，并（ii）证明其准确性和准确性。