No abstract

No abstract

With the fast development of Internet, network traffic rapidly grows and the size of Internet scale gradually becomes bigger. It brings serious challenges to Network Service Chain (NSC) deployment across multiple domains which are managed by different network operators and service providers. It is difficult for each server in the multi-domain network to obtain a global topology view and available resource information of other domains. Meanwhile, there exist various operational strategies for different network operators and service providers in the multi-domain network. How to optimally deploy NSCs in a multidomain network to realize cost efficient and low latency service provisioning is challenging. To this end, in this paper, we study the problem of NSC deployment across multiple domains. Specifically, by leveraging Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, we present a novel service deployment framework to deploy Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in the multi-domain network in a cost efficient and low latency method. Then, we establish a multi-objective optimization model with the target of minimizing end-to-end delay, service cost and operational cost with the constraints of resource allocation and VNF dependency relationships. Furthermore, we design a novel heuristic NSC deployment algorithm to solve the optimization model. In the proposed heuristic algorithm, VNF dependency relationship based NSC processing workflow optimization method and Dijkstra algorithm based NSC deployment adjustment method are presented to optimize delay and cost. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed heuristic deployment algorithm is efficient and outperforms comparison algorithms in terms of end-to-end delay, service cost and operational cost.INDEX TERMS NSC, multi-domain network, cost efficiency, low latency.

Network function virtualization (NFV) technology achieves flexible service deployment by replacing the middleboxes with virtual network functions (VNFs). In NFV, a set of VNFs are chained in a given order, called service function chain (SFC), and accordingly, data flow is steered to traverse all the VNFs in order to offer a service. With a large number of network devices and end users being connected into Internet, there is a growing demand for largescale multi-domain networks to dynamically deploy the SFC across multiple network domains, in order to support efficient service provisioning. To this end, in this paper, we first investigate the state of the art of multi-domain SFC deployment, and then propose an intelligent multi-domain SFC deployment (IMSD) architecture by leveraging software-defined networking (SDN), NFV, and deep learning technologies. Furthermore, we discuss the potential challenges to realize the IMSD and provide some promising solutions. K E Y W O R D S deep learning, multi-domain networks, SDN, SFC deployment 1 | INTRODUCTION Recently, a great variety of middleboxes have been designed to efficiently provide various network services. 1 However, the service provisioning method is not flexible and leads to large capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) since the middleboxes are heavily dependent on specific hardware devices. Fortunately, the emergence of network function virtualization (NFV) technology provides a promising solution to address the issues. NFV decouples network functions from hardware devices and implements them in software, called virtual network functions (VNFs). 2,3 Unlike the middleboxes, the VNFs can be flexibly deployed in the commercial-off-the-shelf devices. NFV

No abstract