Online VNF Chaining and Predictive Scheduling: Optimality and Trade-Offs

For NFV systems, the key design space includes the function chaining for network requests and the resource scheduling for servers. The problem is challenging since NFV systems usually require multiple (often conflicting) design objectives and the computational efficiency of real-time decision making with limited information. Furthermore, the benefits of predictive scheduling to NFV systems still remain unexplored. In this article, we propose POSCARS, an efficient predictive and online service chaining and resource scheduling scheme that achieves tunable trade-offs among various system metrics with stability guarantee. Through a careful choice of granularity in system modeling, we acquire a better understanding of the trade-offs in our design space. By a non-trivial transformation, we decouple the complex optimization problem into a series of online sub-problems to achieve the optimality with only limited information. By employing randomized load balancing techniques, we propose three variants of POSCARS to reduce the overheads of decision making. Theoretical analysis and simulations show that POSCARS and its variants require only mild-value of future information to achieve near-optimal system cost with an ultra-low request response time.