Cost-aware Service Function Chaining With Reliability Guarantees in NFV-enabled Inter-DC Network

Network function virtualization (NFV) moves hardware-based middleboxes to software-defined virtual network functions (VNFs) running on standard machines. By incorporating NFV in inter-DC network, subscribers can orchestrate service function chains (SFCs) intelligently and deploy VNFs faster. However, orchestrating SFCs in inter-DC network will incur high deployment cost, including expensive cross-DC bandwidth cost and virtual network function cost. Moreover, the NFV-enabled SFCs impose higher reliability requirements due to the functional characteristics. The entire SFCs will break down if any of the VNFs fails. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Cost-aware and Reliability-guaranteed SFC Orchestration (CRSO) scheme. CRSO firstly orchestrates SFCs in inter-DC network with less cost based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Then it backups VNFs to satisfy the reliability requirements. Experimental results show CRSO performs well for using about 20.4% less cost compared with the existing algorithm for accommodating the same SFCs.