Availability Aware VNF Deployment in Datacenter Through Shared Redundancy

Abstract

Network function virtualization (NFV) has brought great cost reducing and operation flexibility to network services, in which users' service requests are accomplished by softwares on the common-off-shelf servers rather than dedicated proprietary hardware middleboxes. Then how to guarantee the availability of these services is coming correspondingly owing to the error prone nature of softwares. Resource redundancy has been seen as an efficient way. Moreover, the resource orchestration of softwares is more flexible than that of physical machines. Therefore, how to design a resource efficient solution to assure the availability of network services in NFV environment has been attracting attentions in academics and industries. Network services are usually finished by service function chains (SFC) in NFV, and an SFC is composed by several virtual network functions (VNF) in order. In this paper, we study the availability aware VNF deployment problem considering users' SFC requests (SFCr). To improve the resource efficiency, a Joint Deployment and Backup scheme taking advantage of Shared Redundancy (JDBSR) is proposed. Through the thorough simulations, the results show that our solution has a great advantage over the benchmarks.