Utilisation Profiles of Bridging Function Chain for Healthcare Use Cases

On the road towards personalised medicine, one of the main challenges is to enforce security and network low-level policies to secure data-sharing. The proposed dynamic framework defines the topology of the service chains to enforce network and security policies by instantiating Virtual Network Functions (VNF's) on the fly via light-weight and easily-deployable containers. In this paper, we profile the resource utilisation of chained VNF's deployed to enable data movement within different healthcare use cases. We provide example configurations that map to a couple of use cases (e-Health record query and heath data streaming), then we monitor and collect CPU utilisation of the different VNF compositions. In the considered policies we can: discard flow, protect (encrypt) and transmit, or allow with no protection. To enforce each policy, we deploy a firewall function (relatively heavy-weight function), encryption function, and a decryption function (light-weight stream cipher). As a result, we analyse the behaviour of the VNF services with various setups, and then we aim to further use this analysis to build the placement heuristic according to available and trusted clusters resources. Subsequently, we will recommend heuristic-based placement based on collected profiling data of the resource usage and limits for high availability, optimal performance, and minimal resource waste.