Availability and service disruption of network services: From high-level requirements to low-level configuration constraints

Abstract

In the context of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), a Network Service (NS) is defined as a composition of Network Functions (NFs), which can be Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) or Physical Network Functions (PNFs). The availability of an NS is among its important characteristics. Moreover, when there is a service outage there is often a service disruption. We define the Service Disruption Time for an NS functionality as the amount of time for which the service state is lost due to service outages for a given period. The Service Data Disruption for an NS functionality is defined as the maximum amount of data lost due to a service outage. To have a comprehensive design solution considering service availability and service disruption, we propose a novel method which enhances an NS design by mapping service-level availability and disruption requirements to constraints on low-level configuration parameters, and calculates the number of required standby instances for each VNF so that the requirements can be met. Our method guarantees the availability and disruption requirements at any scaling level of the NS while minimizing the resource cost. To reduce the complexity of the complete search for the optimal configuration we also propose a heuristic algorithm and perform experiments to compare it with the complete search.