Service Function Chain Composition, Placement, and Assignment in Data Centers

Abstract

With the development of network function virtualization (NFV), service function chains (SFCs) are deployed via virtual network functions (VNFs). In general, the SFCs are served via composition and then deployed into data center infrastructures. However, most of the existing works neglect SFC composition. Furthermore, they consider that VNF instances are independently deployed for each SFC, which may underutilize the computational power of servers. We consider, for each required VNF in the chain, the operator can either place it on a new instance or assign it to an established instance if the residual resource of that instance is sufficient. Such a deployment scheme can leverage resources more efficiently and we define it as SFC placement and assignment. In this paper, we first combine SFC composition, placement and assignment together to enhance resource allocation. We present the system model and formulate the problem as 0–1 integer programming. We aim to improve the VNF instance utilization as well as reduce the link consumption. A heuristic approach called Jcap is developed to solve the problem in two stages. The simulations show that Jcap achieves competitive performance with the optimal results obtained from mathematical model.