Service Recovery in NFV-Enabled Networks: Algorithm Design and Analysis

Network function virtualization (NFV), a novel network architecture, promises to offer a lot of convenience in network design, deployment, and management. This paradigm, although flexible, suffers from many risks engendering interruption of services, such as node and link failures. Thus, resiliency is one of the requirements in NFV-enabled network design for recovering network services once occurring failures. Therefore, in addition to a primary chain of virtual network functions (VNFs) for a service, one typically allocates the corresponding backup VNFs to satisfy the resiliency requirement. Nevertheless, this approach consumes network resources that can be inherently employed to deploy more services. Moreover, one can hardly recover all interrupted services due to the limitation of network backup resources. In this context, the importance of the services is one of the factors employed to judge the recovery priority. In this article, we first assign each service a weight expressing its importance, then seek to retrieve interrupted services such that the total weight of the recovered services is maximum. Hence, we also call this issue the VNF restoration for recovering weighted services (VRRWS) problem. We next demonstrate the difficulty of the VRRWS problem is NP-hard and propose an effective technique, termed online recovery algorithm (ORA), to address the problem without necessitating the backup resources. Eventually, we conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm as well as the factors affecting the recovery. The experiment shows that the available VNFs should be migrated to appropriate nodes during the recovery process to achieve better results.