Dynamic backup sharing scheme of service function chains in NFV

Service function chains (SFC) mapping takes the responsibility for managing virtual network functions (VNFs). In SFC mapping, existing solutions duplicate VNFs with redundant instances to provide high availability in response to failures. However, as a compromise, these solutions result in high resource consumption due to device maintenance. In this paper, we propose a novel method named dynamic backup sharing (DBS) that allows SFCs to dynamically share backups to reduce resource consumption. DBS formulates the problem of sharing backups among different VNFs as an integer linear programming (ILP). Thereafter, we design a novel online algorithm based on dynamic programming to solve the problem. The experimental results indicate that DBS outperforms state-of-the-art works by reducing resource consumption and improving the number of accepted requests.