Branch-Awareness in Service Function Graph Design and Embedding

To deliver an end-to-end service in the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environment, Service Function Chain (SFC) is used to define the sequence of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) that needs to be applied to the data stream of the service. In the literature, SFC is typically regarded as a linear topology that represents the sequence of the VNFs that a data stream is navigated through. Our recent study, however, reveals a group of real-life use cases for which a linear topology is in-sufficient to describe the complexity of the SFC: the data stream can branch out into multiple streams due to multiple reasons (e.g., load-balance the web/non-web traffic). In this paper, we study representative use cases with presence of branching, categorize traffic branching into three major categories, and introduce policies to specify the service requirement that involves traffic branching. In addition, we define the resulting problem and discuss directions for further exploration.

[1]  Kohei Shiomoto,et al.  Research Challenges for Network Function Virtualization - Re-Architecting Middlebox for High Performance and Efficient, Elastic and Resilient Platform to Create New Services - , 2018, IEICE Trans. Commun..

[2]  Joseph Naor,et al.  Near optimal placement of virtual network functions , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM).

[3]  Minlan Yu,et al.  Rethinking virtual network embedding: substrate support for path splitting and migration , 2008, CCRV.

[4]  Juan Felipe Botero,et al.  Coordinated Allocation of Service Function Chains , 2014, 2015 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM).

[5]  Didier Colle,et al.  Network service chaining with efficient network function mapping based on service decompositions , 2015, Proceedings of the 2015 1st IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft).

[6]  Chen Sun,et al.  NFP: Enabling Network Function Parallelism in NFV , 2017, SIGCOMM.

[7]  Holger Karl,et al.  Specifying and placing chains of virtual network functions , 2014, 2014 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet).

[8]  Yang Wang,et al.  A branch-and-price framework for optimal virtual network embedding , 2016, Comput. Networks.

[9]  Diego Lopez,et al.  Service Function Chaining Use Cases in Mobile Networks , 2019 .

[10]  Xiaojun Cao,et al.  Virtual network embedding: An optimal decomposition approach , 2014, 2014 23rd International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN).