RAFALE: smaRt and scalable orchestrAtion system For virtuAL network sErvices

Time-efficient and scalable mechanisms have a significant role in aiding cloud providers to deploy their increasingly complex virtual network services in a seamless manner thanks to Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigms. Unfortunately, existing state-of-the-art techniques suffer from non-scalability aptitude and often do not converge rapidly towards feasible solutions, although they provide competetive solutions in acceptable execution time for small-scale scenarios.In this paper, we propose RAFALE, a novel approach that formulates the orchestration problem as a graph matching problem and solves it using two exact algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that attempts to tackle the placement and chaining of the VNFs from a different perspective. Experimental results indicate that RAFALE outperforms, in terms of scalability and time-complexity, the well-known VF2 graph matching algorithm and two existing heuristic-based approaches for the placement and chaining of the VNFs.