Network function consolidation in service function chaining orchestration

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology proposed to improve service provisioning in telecommunication industry. The flexibility of NFV enables network operator to dynamically deploy Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) according to real-time requirements. However, a large amount of VNFs with low utilization may be deployed in network due to dynamic arrival and departure of services and excessive deployment of VNFs. In this paper, we analyse this phenomenon and model it as the Network Function Consolidation (NFC) problem, followed by an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation. We also design a greedy based heuristic to solve large scale cases. We conduct simulations on both real-world and random generated network topologies, and the results show that we can reduce 32% number of VNFs in average.

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