Placement of services with flexible structures specified by a YANG data model

Network function visualization and software-defined networking allow services consisting of virtual network functions to be designed and implemented with great flexibility by facilitating automatic deployments, migrations, and reconfigurations for services and their components. For extended flexibility, we go beyond seeing services as a fixed chain of functions. We present a YANG model for describing the service structure in deployment requests in a flexible way that enables changing the order of functions in case the order of traversing them does not affect the functionality of the service. Upon receiving such requests, the network orchestration system can choose the optimal composition of service components that gives the best results for placement of services in the network. This introduces new complexities to the placement problem by greatly increasing the number of possible ways a service can be composed. In this paper, we describe a heuristic solution that selects a Pareto set of the possible compositions of a service as well as possible combinations of different services, with respect to different resource requirements of the services. Our evaluations show that the selected combinations consist of representative samples of possible structures and requirements and therefore, can result in optimal or close-to-optimal placement results.