Resource Aware Routing for Service Function Chains in SDN and NFV-Enabled Network

Owing to the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networks (SDN), Service Function Chain (SFC) has become a popular service in SDN and NFV-enabled network. However, as the Virtual Network Function (VNF) of each type is generally multi-instance and flows with SFC requests must traverse a series of specified VNFs in predefined orders, it is a challenge for dynamic SFC formation to optimally select VNF instances and construct paths. Moreover, the load balancing and end-to-end delay need to be paid attention to, when routing flows with SFC requests. Additionally, fine-grained scheduling for traffic at flow level needs differentiated routing which should take flow features into consideration. Unfortunately, traditional algorithms cannot fulfill all these requirements. In this paper, we study the Differentiated Routing Problem considering SFC (DRP-SFC) in SDN and NFV-enabled network. We formulate the DRP-SFC as a Binary Integer Programming (BIP) model aiming to minimize the resource consumption costs of flows with SFC requests. Then a novel routing algorithm, Resource Aware Routing Algorithm (RA-RA), is proposed to solve the DRP-SFC. Performance evaluation shows that RA-RA can efficiently solve the DRP-SFC and surpass the performance of other existing algorithms in acceptance rate, throughput, hop count and load balancing.