Service Function Path Provisioning With Topology Aggregation in Multi-Domain Optical Networks

Abstract

Traffic flows are often processed by a chain of Service Functions (SFs) (known as Service Function Chaining (SFC)) to satisfy service requirements. The deployed path for a SFC is called Service Function Path (SFP). SFs can be virtualized and migrated to datacenters, thanks to the evolution of Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In such a scenario, provisioning of paths (i.e., SFPs) between virtualized network functions is an important problem. SFP provisioning becomes more complex in a multi-domain network topology. `Topology aggregation' helps to create a single-domain view of such a network by abstracting multi-domain networks. However, traditional `topology aggregation' methods are unable to abstract SF resources properly, which is required for SFP provisioning. In this paper, we propose an SFC-Oriented Topology Aggregation (SOTA) method to enable abstraction for SFs in multi-domain optical networks. This study explores the node and the link aggregation degree to evaluate information compression during the `Topology aggregation' process. Additionally, we also propose a new data structure named wheel matrix and related operations to store routing information in the aggregated topology. Based on SOTA, we propose two cross-domain SFP provisioning algorithms named Ordered Anchor Selection (OAS) and ${k}$ -paths OAS (K-OAS), and a benchmark named Global OAS (GOAS). Simulation results show that SOTA could aggregate large-scale multi-domain optical networks into a small network that contains only 6.9% of the nodes and 10.1% of the links. Both OAS and K-OAS can calculate SFPs efficiently and reduce blocking probability up to 52.10% compared to the benchmark.