Reliability-aware virtual network function placement in carrier networks

Abstract Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a promising technology that implements Virtual Network Function (VNF) with software on general servers. Traffic needs to go through a set of ordered VNFs, which is called a Service Function Chain (SFC). Rational deployment of VNFs can reduce costs and increase profits for network operators. However, during the deployment of the VNFs, how to guarantee the reliability of SFC requirements while optimizing network resource cost is still an open problem. To this end, we study the problem of reliability-aware VNF placement in carrier networks. In this paper, we firstly redefine the reliability of SFC, which is the product of the reliability of all nodes and physical links in SFC. On this basis, we propose two reliability protection mechanisms: the All-Nodes Protection Mechanism (ANPM) and the Single-Node Protection Mechanism (SNPM). Following this, for each protection mechanism, we formulate the problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model. Due to the problem complexity, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on Dynamic Programming and Lagrangian Relaxation for each protection mechanism. With extensive simulations using real world topologies, our results show that compared with the benchmark algorithm and ANPM, SNPM can save up to 33.34% and 26.76% network resource cost on average respectively while guaranteeing the reliability requirement of SFC requests, indicating that SNPM performs better than ANPM and has better application potential in carrier networks.

[1]  Didier Colle,et al.  Deploying elastic routing capability in an SDN/NFV-enabled environment , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Network (NFV-SDN).

[2]  Filip De Turck,et al.  Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges , 2015, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[3]  Chunming Qiao,et al.  Availability-aware mapping of service function chains , 2017, IEEE INFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[4]  S. Chiba,et al.  Dynamic programming algorithm optimization for spoken word recognition , 1978 .

[5]  Chunming Qiao,et al.  GREP: Guaranteeing Reliability with Enhanced Protection in NFV , 2015, HotMiddlebox@SIGCOMM.

[6]  Meral Shirazipour,et al.  Network Function Placement for NFV Chaining in Packet/Optical Datacenters , 2015, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[7]  Djamal Zeghlache,et al.  Energy Efficient Algorithm for VNF Placement and Chaining , 2017, 2017 17th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID).

[8]  Seungjoon Lee,et al.  Network function virtualization: Challenges and opportunities for innovations , 2015, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[9]  Peilin Hong,et al.  Energy-Aware Service Function Placement for Service Function Chaining in Data Centers , 2016, 2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM).

[10]  Xueli An,et al.  Data-Center Architecture Impacts on Virtualized Network Functions Service Chain Embedding with High Availability Requirements , 2015, 2015 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps).

[11]  Kate Ching-Ju Lin,et al.  Deploying chains of virtual network functions: On the relation between link and server usage , 2016, IEEE INFOCOM 2016 - The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[12]  Chadi Assi,et al.  A Reliability-Aware Network Service Chain Provisioning With Delay Guarantees in NFV-Enabled Enterprise Datacenter Networks , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management.

[13]  Ved P. Kafle,et al.  Reliable service function chain provisioning in software-defined networking , 2017, 2017 13th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM).

[14]  Joonhyuk Kang,et al.  On the Trade-Off Between Computational Load and Reliability for Network Function Virtualization , 2017, IEEE Communications Letters.

[15]  Chunming Qiao,et al.  Joint topology design and mapping of service function chains for efficient, scalable, and reliable network functions virtualization , 2016, IEEE Network.

[16]  Balázs Németh,et al.  Customizable real-time service graph mapping algorithm in carrier grade networks , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Network (NFV-SDN).

[17]  Didier Colle,et al.  A network service development kit supporting the end-to-end lifecycle of NFV-based telecom services , 2017, 2017 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN).

[18]  Fumio Machida,et al.  Redundant virtual machine placement for fault-tolerant consolidated server clusters , 2010, 2010 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium - NOMS 2010.

[19]  Saeedeh Parsaeefard,et al.  vSPACE: VNF Simultaneous Placement, Admission Control and Embedding , 2018, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[20]  Alpár Jüttner,et al.  Lagrange relaxation based method for the QoS routing problem , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[21]  Xavier Hesselbach,et al.  Virtual Network Embedding: A Survey , 2013, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[22]  Francesco Musumeci,et al.  Virtual Network Function placement for resilient Service Chain provisioning , 2016, 2016 8th International Workshop on Resilient Networks Design and Modeling (RNDM).

[23]  Hongxia Wang,et al.  Developed Dijkstra shortest path search algorithm and simulation , 2010, 2010 International Conference On Computer Design and Applications.

[24]  Biswanath Mukherjee,et al.  Demand-Aware Network Function Placement , 2016, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[25]  Ying-Dar Lin,et al.  Energy Cost Optimization in Dynamic Placement of Virtualized Network Function Chains , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management.

[26]  Yuefeng Ji,et al.  Baseband unit cloud interconnection enabled by flexible grid optical networks with software defined elasticity , 2015, IEEE Communications Magazine.