Energy-Efficient Service Function Chain Provisioning in Multi-Domain Networks

Service Function Chain (SFC) is not only helpful for saving the capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) of network provider, but also can reduce energy consumption in the substrate network. However, to best of our knowledge, few researches focus on the problem of energy consumption for provisioning SFC requests in multi-domain networks. In this paper, we firstly formulate the problem of energy-efficient online SFC request provisioning across multiple domains by using integer linear programming (ILP). Then we propose a heuristic algorithm called EE-SFCO-MD for efficiently solving this problem. We conduct simulation experiments for evaluating the performance of our algorithm. The simulation results show that EE-SFCO-MD performs better than existing approaches.