Service Chain Composition with Failures in NFV Systems: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

Network functions virtualization (NFV) initiates a revolution of network service (NS) delivery by forming each NS as a chain of virtual network functions across commodity servers. However, it still remains a key challenge in NFV to decide the chains that induce short latency and low congestion, a.k.a. service chain composition problem. Existing works mainly resort to centralized solutions that require full knowledge of the network state to coordinate different users' traffic and NSs, overlooking privacy issues and the non-cooperative interactions among users. Moreover, handling the possible failures due to user/resource unavailability makes the problem even more challenging. By modeling the service chain composition problem with respect to both user and resource failures as a noncooperative game, we formulate the problem as searching the Nash Equilibrium (NE) with the optimal system performances. By exploiting the unique problem structure, we show that the game is a weighted potential game. We propose DISCCA, a distributed and low-complexity algorithm that guides the system towards the NE with short latency and low congestion, through decision making by individual users with local information. Results from extensive simulations show that DISCCA effectively achieves near-optimal system performances within mild-value of iterations, even in the presence of failures.

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