On the Scaling of Virtualized Network Functions

Offering Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) as a service requires automation of cloud resource management to allocate cloud resources for the VNFs dynamically. Most of the existing solutions focus only on the initial resource allocation. However, the allocation of resources must adapt to dynamic traffic demands and support fast scaling mechanisms. There are three basic scaling models: vertical where re-scaling is achieved by changing the resources assigned to the VNF in the host server, horizontal where VNFs are replicated or removed to do rescaling, and migration where VNFs are moved to servers with more resources. In this paper, we present an Iterated Local Search (ILS) based framework for automation of resource reallocation that supports the three scaling models. We, then, use the framework to run experiments and compare the different scaling approaches, specifically how the optimization is affected by the scaling approach and the optimization objectives.