Virtual network function instantiation and service function chaining mapping in Wide Area Network

In this paper, under the framework of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), we investigate how to instantiate Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on Telecom Clouds (TCs) and map Service Function Chaining (SFC) to Wide Area Network (WAN) which consists of TCs and links among the TCs with the objective of minimizing the instantiation and mapping cost. Compared with the traditional virtual network mapping problems, we jointly consider VNFs instantiation and SFC mapping problem. We build model MSFCSAP for the instantiation and mapping problem and propose a novel heuristic algorithm based on the MSFCSAP model to consider the features of SFCs while solving the VNFs instantiation and SFC mapping problem jointly. The simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms the other existing approaches in terms of instantiation and mapping cost and time complexity.