Proposal and Investigation of a Scalable NFV Orchestrator Based on Segment Routing Data/Control Plane

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has attracted significant interest in recent years due to its agility to adopt new technology and its flexibility in on-demand deployment of network functions. A major topic in the field of NFV research is the allocation and orchestration of VNF instances to provide satisfying network services according to user demands. The paper proposes and investigates a new solution for a scalable NFV Orchestrator allowing for a reduction of the needed time for the Service Function Chain routing and the allocation of cloud and bandwidth resources. That is obtained by abstracting and simplifying in the NFV orchestrator the knowledge of both the network topology and the resource amount available in the datacenters in which the Virtual Network Functions are executed. The solution is based on the Segment Routing paradigm that allows to implement the scalable orchestration at data plane level. Finally we show how the proposed solution reduce by 90% the time needed to execute an SFC routing and resource allocation algorithm with respect to a traditional orchestration solution.