Joint Availability- and Traffic-aware Placement of Parallelized Service Chain in NFV-enabled Data Center

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) brings flexible provisioning and great convenience for enterprises outsource their network functions to the Data Center Networks (DCNs). Network service in NFV is deployed as a service chain, also known as Service Function Chain (SFC), which includes an ordered set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). However, there might be some small size flows being queued behind the large flows in one SFC, resulting in network congestion and high SFC delay. In this paper, we focus on the parallelized SFC placement problem in DCN considering availability guarantee and resource optimization. Firstly, we define the parallelized SFC and propose a multi-flow backup model. Then, we design three placement strategies and a Hybrid Placement Algorithm (HPA) aiming at mapping SFCs to DCN. Compared with the existing approaches, our proposed solutions can reduce SFC delay and optimize link consumption while guaranteeing availability.