Deployment of service function chain for NFV-enabled network with delay constraint

Network function virtualization (NFV) is an important solution to provide flexible and diverse services with economic cost. In NFV paradigm, all the network services are provided by means of service function chain (SFC), and the deployed SFCs should satisfy the quality of service. This paper focuses on the deployment of SFC for NFV-enabled network with delay constraint. By formulating the total delay of the SFC as processing and transmission delays, the SFC deployment is founded as a mixed integer nonlinear programming. On the basis of that, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to reduce the complexity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is effective to guarantee the satisfaction of the delay constraint and reduce the consumption of network resource simultaneously.