Achieving Efficient SFC Proactive Reconfiguration Through Deep Reinforcement Learning in Programmable Networks

Service function chain (SFC) consists of multiple ordered network functions (e.g., firewall, load balancer) and plays an important role in improving network security and ensuring network performance. Offloading SFCs onto programmable switches can bring significant performance improvement, but it suffers from unbearable reconfiguration delays, making it hard to cope with network workload dynamics in a timely manner. To bridge the gap, this paper presents OptRec, an efficient SFC proactive reconfiguration optimization framework based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). OptRec predicts future traffic and places SFCs on programmable switches in advance to ensure the timeliness of the SFC reconfiguration, which is a proactive approach. However, it is non-trivial to extract effective features from historical traffic information and global network states, while ensuring efficient and stable model training. To this end, OptRec introduces a multi-level feature extraction model for different types of features. Additionally, it combines reinforcement learning and autoregressive learning to enhance model efficiency and stability. Results of in-depth simulations based on real-world datasets show the average prediction error of OptRec is less than 3% and OptRec can increase the system throughput by up to 69.6%~72.6% compared with other alternatives.