Orchestrating Service Function Chains with Joint Resource Optimization in NFV Networks

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) transforms traditional network functions (NFs) into software through the virtualization technology, enabling easy deployment and management of NFs and improving the network flexibility. The flexibility, however, brings new challenges to network operators because of the massive deployable positions, complex NF relationships and varying network traffic. In this paper, we analyze the essential causes of the traffic dynamics and their impacts on computing and bandwidth resources regarding different NFs. We formulate the Service Function Chaining (SFC) embedding problem (which is NP-hard) and propose an intuitive solution for service function chaining for several typical cases. Motivated by the case studies, we further propose a general heuristic algorithm to solve the SFC embedding problem. Compared to the existing works, the proposed solution considers both computing and bandwidth resources and thus can achieve more efficient SFC orchestration. The extensive simulation evaluation results show that the proposed solution significantly improves the resource utilization compared to the existing works.