Reducing the Service Function Chain Backup Cost Over the Edge and Cloud by a Self-Adapting Scheme

Emerging virtual network functions (VNFs) bring new opportunities to network services on the edge within customers’ premises. Network services are realized by chained up VNFs, which are called service function chains (SFCs). These services are deployed on commercial edge servers for higher flexibility and scalability. Despite such promises, it is still unclear how to provide highly available and cost-effective SFCs under edge resource limitations and time-varying VNF failures. In this paper, we propose a novel Reliability-aware Adaptive Deployment scheme named RAD to efficiently place and back up SFCs over both the edge and the cloud. Specifically, RAD first deploys SFCs to fully utilize edge resources. It then uses both static backups and dynamic ones created on the fly to guarantee the availability under the resource limitation of edge networks. RAD does not assume failure rates of VNFs but instead strives to find the sweet spot between the desired availability of SFCs and the backup cost. Theoretical performance bounds, extensive simulations, and small-scale experiments highlight that RAD provides significantly higher availability with lower backup costs compared with existing baselines.