Multi-Resource Scheduling for Multiple Service Function Chains with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

The modern network is equipped with many service functions to acquire high-quality service. The emergence of network function virtualization (NFV) provides a convenient way to accomplish the network services in the form of virtual network function (VNF) and also makes the scheduling solution of VNFs flexible. The VNFs can be deployed on commodity servers as software processes. Besides, multiple VNFs are chained in a specified order as a service function chain (SFC) to serve a given flow, increasing the scheduling difficulty to minimize the average flow completion time. In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling multiple SFCs with the constraint of different resource limitations in various commodity servers. This problem is typically formulated as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, which is NP-hard. To well tackle this problem, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach. It involves multi-step decision making, which can be naturally transformed into a DRL problem. We design specific reward and state representations for such a multi-resource scheduling problem. We also consider how to use DRL to handle online requests of SFCs. The experiment results demonstrate that the DRL approach can significantly reduce the average completion time of a set of SFC and achieves a cost saving of 39.94% against the benchmark method.