A Coordinated Algorithm with Resource Evaluation for Service Function Chain Allocation

In the delivery of end-to-end services, Network Functions (NFs) are frequently utilized. Traditionally, these NFs are implemented on middle-boxes. Since physical middle-boxes are hardware-based, expensive and hard to maintain and upgrade, they are replaced by Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) following the trend of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Nowadays services are implemented by the ordered combination of a set of VNFs that are deployed in appropriate place within the network. The problems brought by NFV are: How to construct the VNFs chain and How the VNFs chain is allocated to Substrate Network (SN). In this paper, a Modified Topological Sort Algorithm (MTSA) is proposed to solve the two problems simultaneous and two node selection strategies (Embedding Node Selection Strategy (ENSS) and Virtual Node Selection Strategy (VNSS)) based on resource evaluation are raised to further improve the efficiency. Simulation experiments show that the proposed method significantly decreases the backtracking steps which guarantee a reasonable runtime.

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