Joint Energy Efficient and QoS-aware Path Allocation and VNF Placement for Service Function Chaining

Service Function Chaining (SFC) allows the forwarding of a traffic flow along a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs, e.g., IDS, firewall, and NAT). Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions can be used to support SFC reducing the management complexity and the operational costs. One of the most critical issues for the service and network providers is the reduction of energy consumption, which should be achieved without impact to the quality of services. In this paper, we propose a novel resource (re)allocation architecture which enables energy-aware SFC for SDN-based networks. To this end, we model the problems of VNF placement, allocation of VNFs to flows, and flow routing as optimization problems. Thereafter, heuristic algorithms are proposed for the different optimization problems, in order find near-optimal solutions in acceptable times. The performance of the proposed algorithms are numerically evaluated over a real-world topology and various network traffic patterns. The results confirm that the proposed heuristic algorithms provide near optimal solutions while their execution time is applicable for real-life networks.Comment: Extended version of submitted paper - v7 - July 201

Energy-efficient path allocation heuristic for service function chaining

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is a service deployment concept that promises cost efficiency and increases flexibility for computer networks. On the other hand, Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides a powerful infrastructure to implement SFC. In this paper, we mathematically formulate the SFC problem in SDN-based networks. In this way, the energy consumption of the network is minimized while the traffic congestion is controlled through network reconfiguration.Additionally, a low complex heuristic algorithm is proposed to find a near-optimal solution for the mentioned problem. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic reconfigures the network in a way that the energy consumption is near-optimal while the SFC requirements are met. Besides, the computational complexity is very low which makes it applicable for real-world networks