SET: a Simple and Effective Technique to improve cost efficiency of VNF placement and chaining algorithms for network service provisioning

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a promising solution to provide cost-efficient, scalable and rapid deployment of network services. It allows the implementation of fine-grained services as a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In order to place the VNF chains in the network, several cost-efficient methods have been already proposed. However, a few works have considered order of VNFs to reduce the cost. In this paper, we propose a Simple and Effective Technique (SET), which can be easily combined with VNF placement methods to dramatically improve their cost efficiency by considering different possible orders for the VNFs in the chain. As a proof-of-concept, we combine the proposed technique with one of the recent cost-efficient VNF placement and chaining algorithms called CCVP. The results show that the combination can yield significantly better cost than CCVP operating solo.