A Dynamic Placement Mechanism of Service Function Chaining Based on Software-defined Networking

Abstract

To cope with the explosive growth of Internet services, Service Function Chaining (SFC) based on Software-defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging and promising technology that has been suggested to meet this challenge. Determining the placement of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and routing paths that optimize the network utilization and resource consumption is a challenging problem, particularly without violating service level agreements (SLAs). This problem is called the optimal SFC placement problem and an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation is provided. A greedy heuristic solution is also provided based on an improved two-step mapping algorithm. The obtained experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can automatically place VNFs at the optimal locations and find the optimal routing paths for each online request. This algorithm can increase the average request acceptance rate by about 17.6% and provide more than 20-fold reduction of the computational complexity compared to the Greedy algorithm. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated via NetFPGA-10G prototype implementation.