  Network Function Virtualization (NFV) prescribes the instantiation of network
functions on general-purpose network devices, such as servers and switches.
While yielding a more flexible and cost-effective network architecture, NFV is
potentially limited by the fact that commercial off-the-shelf hardware is less
reliable than the dedicated network elements used in conventional cellular
deployments. The typical solution for this problem is to duplicate network
functions across geographically distributed hardware in order to ensure
diversity. In contrast, this letter proposes to leverage channel coding in
order to enhance the robustness on NFV to hardware failure. The proposed
approach targets the network function of uplink channel decoding, and builds on
the algebraic structure of the encoded data frames in order to perform
in-network coding on the signals to be processed at different servers. The key
principles underlying the proposed coded NFV approach are presented for a
simple embodiment and extensions are discussed. Numerical results demonstrate
the potential gains obtained with the proposed scheme as compared to the
conventional diversity-based fault-tolerant scheme in terms of error
probability.
