Network Service Embedding for Cross-Service Communication

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) facilitates the deployment and orchestration of network services (NSes) on virtualized infrastructures. NFV orchestration, in its prevailing form, deals with NSes independent to each other. This introduces significant limitations to cross-service interactions, i.e., a service that requires the consumption of (part of) another service. In an evolving service ecosystem that promotes cross-service interactions, orchestrating NSes with their cross-service communication (CSC) requirements into account is of crucial importance. In this paper, we propose a CSC-aware NS embedding heuristic that optimizes NS placement, not only based on inner-component resource and communication demands, but also with respect to another deployed NS that will be consumed. To this end, we study potential types of CSC and introduce a new data structure, namely VNF embedding tree, which is used to generate the most appropriate embedding sequence. Assessing the efficiency of the proposed heuristic using simulations, we uncover significant gains in terms of service co-location without any perceptible embedding efficiency penalty, compared to a baseline heuristic that is oblivious of CSC.