Deploying Disaster-Resilient Service Function Chains Using Adaptive Multi-Path Routing

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a technology that deploys network services and functions as software components in data centers and cloud environments. One of its key applications is Service Function Chain (SFC), which chains Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in a specific order to deliver a desired service. However, disaster resiliency is a critical challenge when deploying NFV and SFC, as natural disasters and hardware failures can disrupt network operations and lead to service interruption or degradation across an entire disaster zone (DZ). This paper presents a new method for protecting SFCs using multi-path routing, which enables to split an SFC on multiple DZ-disjoint working paths and leverage a shared backup path for protection. The proposed Multi-path Protection (MP) minimizes network resource consumption, including both the bandwidth for request routing and the computing resources for VNF execution. We propose a heuristic approach that offers a near-optimal SFC MP solution in a time-efficient way. Numerical results show that the proposed MP strategy outperforms traditional Dedicated Protection (DP) in terms of resource consumption, resulting in significant gain up to 20%.