A Novel Method for Resource Efficient Security Service Chain Embedding Oriented to Cloud Datacenter Networks

An important and promising application for the network function virtualization (NFV) technology is in network security, where can dynamically and flexibly accomplish the chaining virtualized security network functions (VSNFs), e.g., network address translation, antispam and packet filter firewall, etc., and thus inspect, monitor or filter traffic flows in the cloud datacenter networks. However, the traffic flows addressed by the VSNFs mainly depend on the security service requirements from mobile users, such as the network security level, end-to-end latency, and security resource, etc. Considering the dynamic nature of cloud datacenter networks, determining the embedding of VSNFs and routing security service paths that optimizes the security resource utilization is a challenging problem, particularly without violating the end-to-end delay constraints and security service requirements. This can also be called security service chain dynamic embedding problem (SSC-DMP). In this paper, we present an NFV-enabled framework for a system that achieves the SSC dynamic embedding in the cloud datacenter networks. We first formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) model to solve the SSC-DMP exactly in small-scale network topology. Then, in order to reduce the time complexity when applying the large-scale network topology, we propose an efficient SSC dynamic embedding solution that is based on the particle swarm optimization. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm could significantly outperform the current benchmarks at least 35.2% and 23.1% in terms of resource consumption and end-to-end delay, respectively.