Virtual Network Function Placement for Service Function Chaining with Minimum Energy Consumption

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technique to improve the performance of enterprise networks. This technique moves packet processing from hardware middleboxes to virtual network functions (VNFs) running on servers. Traffic flows are usually required to pass through a specific sequence of VNFs to satisfy access control policies specified by an enterprise network administrator. In this paper, we consider the problem of routing of traffic flows and determining the number and location of VNFs to be deployed in the network for minimizing the server energy consumption. Additionally, we guarantee that the traffic flows pass all the necessary VNFs in a specified sequence and also meet end-to-end delays and bandwidth consumption constraints. We formulate the problem as an integer liner programming task and solve it with CPLEX. The simulation results show that we can save up to 33 % of server energy consumption for typical ISP networks.