Availability Aware VNF Deployment in Datacenter Through Shared Redundancy and Multi-Tenancy

By means of network function virtualization (NFV), dedicated proprietary network devices can be implemented as software and instantiated flexibly on common-off-the-shelf servers, in the form of virtual network functions (VNF). NFV can bring great cost reduction as well as operation flexibility. However, it also brings new problems, one of which is how to meet the availability of network services in the VNF deployment process, because of the error prone nature of software. The availability aware VNF deployment problem has attracted attention by academics, and reserving redundancy has been treated as the de facto technology. Compared with traditional backup schemes for physical machines, resource orchestration in NFV is more flexible and the characteristics of software should be considered to improve resource utilization efficiency. Based on the above considerations, in this paper we further study the availability aware VNF deployment problem in datacenter networks. To improve the resource utilization efficiency, the sharing mechanism of redundancy and multi-tenancy technology are taken into account. Then we formulate the problem mathematically and propose a joint deployment and backup scheme (JDBS). Finally, we conduct a numerical simulation in detail and compare it with four contrasting schemes in the existing literature. The simulation results show that JDBS is obviously superior to the contrasting schemes and can save about 40% resources at most.