Profit-driven resource provisioning in NFV-based environments

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emergent paradigm that is currently transforming the way network services are provisioned and managed. The main idea of NFV is to decouple network functions from the hardware running them. This allows to reduce deployment costs and further improve the flexibility and the scalability of network services. Despite these benefits, a major challenge cloud providers are still facing is how to efficiently allocate resources for NFV-based services in a way that reduces operational costs and maximizes their profits. In this paper, we address this particular challenge and propose an effective profit-driven service chain provisioning scheme designed for large-scale infrastructures spanning different geographically-distributed sites. We hence propose three algorithms that maximize the provider's profit taking into consideration energy consumption of the infrastructure and the variability of energy prices in different locations. Through extensive simulations, we show that these algorithms are able to efficiently find near-optimal resource allocations and maximize the provider's profit with minimal computational complexity.