Joint Availability Guarantee and Resource Optimization of Virtual Network Function Placement in Data Center Networks

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a promising technology that decouples network functions from the physical device on which they deployed. Network service in NFV is deployed as Service Function Chain (SFC) that consists of an ordered set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper, we focus on the VNF placement problem in data center networks considering availability guarantee and resource optimization. Firstly, we define an availability model that takes both physical device failures and VNF failures into consideration when evaluating the availability of SFC. Secondly, we propose a novel Joint Path-VNF (JPV) backup model that combines path backup and VNF backup in a joint way. In the JPV backup model, resource consumption can be effectively reduced. Finally, we design an Affinity-Based Algorithm (ABA) to reduce physical link consumption when map VNFs. The evaluation results show that ABA and JPV can achieve better availability improvement (99.99%) with less resource (reduce 40% PL consumption).