An approach to deploy service function chains in satellite networks

Abstract

Satellite communication network (SCN) has the capability to provide long-distance and high-quality communi­cation services. It could play a significant role in the future networks for its high reliability and large capacity. However, SCN still needs more efficient resources allocation and dynamical traffic scheduling. As a new design paradigm, network functions virtualization (NFV) is potential to facilitate the performance of traditional networks, including SCN. Therefore, the applicability of NFV in SCN has attracted many people's attention, especially the study on service function chains (SFC). In this paper, we try to explain the problem of SFC deployment in NFV-enabled SCN and deal with it. Our main goal is to minimize the end-to-end service delay and then achieve flexible service orchestration. Based on the general NFV-enabled architectures, we build a time-varying SCN model and novel forms of SFC requests. Then we formulize this problem and propose an effective approach named SFC deployment in satellite network (SDSN). The solution is conducive to promoting the development of SCN. The simulation results show that SDSN could not only take much shorter execution time and minimize the total delay, but also has a good performance in the resource utilization and acceptance ratio.