In recent years, much attention has been focused on deploying service function chains (SFCs), each of which is composed of a set of virtual network functions (VNFs) in a specified order. This is a promising approach for enabling cloud service providers to deploy user service requests more flexibly while saving costs. However, less effort has been directed toward meeting heterogeneous needs, such as high throughput or low latency of user service requests with heterogeneous bandwidth demands, especially in data center networks (DCNs). In this paper, we propose an efficient orchestration algorithm for online SFC requests. It first splits a large flow into a number of subflows and replicates the same number of sub-SFCs. Each subflow is redirected to one of these ''parallelized'' sub-SFCs, which is termed a sub-user request. Then, each sub-user request is deployed based on a worst-fit strategy, and VNFs in the same SFC are instantiated on the same server to the greatest possible extent. Our algorithm is expected to enable network load balancing, reducing the delay experienced by small flows while improving the acceptance ratio for user requests. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other comparable algorithms.INDEX TERMS Service function chain, splitting, data center network, orchestration, load balancing.

No abstract