Leveraging Heterogeneous NFV Platforms to Upgrade Service Function Chains in DCNs

The advances on SmartNICs and programmable data plane (PDP) switches motivate people to deploy virtual network functions (vNFs) on these devices directly for better packet processing performance. Hence, this work considers how to leverage heterogeneous network function virtualization (NFV) platforms to upgrade the provisioning of vNF service chains (vNF-SCs) in a datacenter network (DCN). We design a novel time-efficient heuristic, to plan the service upgrade under a limited budget such that the QoS improvement on latency reduction can be maximized. Specifically, our algorithm first chooses nodes in the DCN to upgrade (i.e., by either equipping SmartNICs on certain servers or replacing switches with PDPSWs), and then adjusts vNF-SC provisioning accordingly.