Low-latency and Resource-efficient Service Function Chaining Orchestration in Network Function Virtualization

© 2014 IEEE. Recently, network function virtualization (NFV) has been proposed to solve the dilemma faced by traditional networks and to improve network performance through hardware and software decoupling. The deployment of the service function chain (SFC) is a key technology that affects the performance of virtual network function (VNF). The key issue in the deployment of SFCs is proposing effective algorithms to achieve efficient use of resources. In this article, we propose an SFC deployment optimization (SFCDO) algorithm based on a breadth-first search (BFS). The algorithm first uses a BFS-based algorithm to find the shortest path between the source node and the destination node. Then, based on the shortest path, the path with the fewest hops is preferentially chosen to implement the SFC deployment. Finally, we compare the performances with the greedy and simulated annealing (G-SA) algorithm. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm is optimized in terms of end-to-end delay and bandwidth resource consumption. In addition, we also consider the load rate of the nodes to achieve network load balancing

Online parallelized service function chain orchestration in data center networks

In recent years, much attention has been focused on deploying service function chains (SFCs), each of which is composed of a set of virtual network functions (VNFs) in a specified order. This is a promising approach for enabling cloud service providers to deploy user service requests more flexibly while saving costs. However, less effort has been directed toward meeting heterogeneous needs, such as high throughput or low latency of user service requests with heterogeneous bandwidth demands, especially in data center networks (DCNs). In this paper, we propose an efficient orchestration algorithm for online SFC requests. It first splits a large flow into a number of subflows and replicates the same number of sub-SFCs. Each subflow is redirected to one of these "parallelized" sub-SFCs, which is termed a sub-user request. Then, each sub-user request is deployed based on a worst-fit strategy, and VNFs in the same SFC are instantiated on the same server to the greatest possible extent. Our algorithm is expected to enable network load balancing, reducing the delay experienced by small flows while improving the acceptance ratio for user requests. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other comparable algorithms. 2019 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61571098, and in part by the 111 Project under Grant B14039.Scopus2-s2.0-8507795083