Cost-Efficient Service Function Chain Orchestration for Low-Latency Applications in NFV Networks

With the popularization and development of cloud computing, network function virtualization and service function chain (SFC) provisioning have attracted increasing attention from researchers. Excellent and reliable network service is important for network development. Moreover, as the number of network users increases, network service construction costs become very high. Therefore, an efficient algorithm is necessary to provide an SFC with excellent performance and low resource costs. In this paper, we re-examine the problem of optimizing the deployment of an SFC to provide users with excellent and resource-saving network service. We propose a heuristic, closed-loop feedback (CLF) algorithm to find the shortest path to map an SFC. To solve the problem, we introduce and integrate a restricted Boltzmann machine and cross entropy to improve the performance of CLF. Simulation results demonstrate the excellent performance of CLF. The communication delay is reduced by approximately 20%, the accept ratio improves by approximately 15%, and the algorithm running time decreases by approximately 20%. In addition, the resource utilization ratio increases by approximately 15%, and the resource fragmentation ratio decreases by approximately 50%.