Survivable Mapping for Dynamic Service Function Chains in Telecom Networks

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology to improve the flexibility and scalability of network services through a process called Service Function Chain (SFC) mapping, with which traffic needs to go through the desired Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) according to predefined policies. However, how to guarantee the survivability of dynamic SFCs against a single link/node failure is still an open problem. To this end, we first study the problem of survivable mapping for dynamic SFCs. Two protection mechanisms, i.e., path protection and segment protection, are considered in our study. We propose a novel heuristic algorithm based on bipartite matching for the two protection mechanisms. The algorithm can rapidly find the resource-efficient mapping solution from the SFC graph to the NFV infrastructure graph. Extensive simulation results show that compared with the benchmark algorithm, our algorithm achieves a good trade-off between running time and throughput ratio in the dynamic scenario.