Energy- and Reliability-Aware Provisioning of Parallelized Service Function Chains With Delay Guarantees

Abstract

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) leverages virtualization and cloud computing technologies to make networks more flexible, manageable, and scalable. Instead of using traditional hardware middleboxes, NFV uses more flexible Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) running on commodity servers. One of the key challenges in NFV is to ensure strict reliability and low latency while also improving energy efficiency. Any software or hardware failures in an NFV environment can disrupt the service provided by a chain of VNFs, known as a Service Function Chain (SFC), resulting in significant data loss, delays, and wasted resources. Due to the sequential nature of SFC, latency increases linearly with the number of VNFs. To address this issue, researchers have proposed parallelized SFC or VNF parallelization, which allows multiple independent VNFs in an SFC to run in parallel. In this work, we propose a method to solve the parallelized SFC deployment problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) that minimizes energy consumption while ensuring reliability and delay constraints. Since the problem is NP-hard, we also propose a heuristic scheme named ERASE that determines the placement of VNFs and routes traffic through them in a way that minimizes energy consumption while meeting capacity, reliability, and delay requirements. The effectiveness of ERASE is evaluated through extensive simulations and it is shown to perform better than benchmark schemes in terms of total energy consumption and reliability achieved. © 2017 IEEE.