scholarly journals Scalable Cost-Efficient Placement and Chaining of Virtual Network Functions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Caggiani Luizelli ◽  
Luciana Salete Buriol ◽  
Luciano Paschoal Gaspary
Author(s):  
Lyes Bouali ◽  
Selma Khebbache ◽  
Samia Bouzefrane ◽  
Mehammed Daoui

: The advent of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized numerous network based applications due to its score of benefits such as flexibility, agility, scalability and Multi-tenancy. In this paper, we focus on the mapping of Virtual Network Function Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FGs) on a Substrate Network. To cope with this NP-Hard problem, we designed an algorithm based on Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP), a cost-efficient meta-heuristic algorithm, in which the main objective is to minimize the mapping cost. Another method named MARA (Most Available Resource Algorithm) was devised with the objective of reducing the Substrate Network’s resources use at the bottleneck clusters. Performance analysis based on simulations are given to show the behavior and efficiency of our approaches.


Author(s):  
Marcelo Luizelli ◽  
Luciana Buriol ◽  
Luciano Gaspary

While Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is increasingly gaining momentum, with promising benefits of flexible service function deployment and reduced operations and management costs, there are several challenges that remain to be properly tackled, so that it can realize its full potential. One of these challenges, which has a significant impact on the NFV production chain, is effectively and (cost) efficiently deploying service functions, while ensuring that service level agreements are satisfied and making wise allocations of network resources. Despite recent research activity in the field, little has been done towards scalable and cost-efficient placement & chaining of virtual network functions (VNFs) – a key feature for the effective success of NFV. In this thesis, we approach VNF placement and chaining as an optimization problem in the context of Interand Intra-datacenter. We formalize the Virtual Network Function Placement and Chaining (VNFPC) problem and propose a mathematical model to solve it. Our model has established one of the first baseline comparison in the field of resource management in NFV and has been widely used in the recent literature. We also address scalability of VNFPC problem to solve large instances by proposing a novel fix-and-optimize-based heuristic algorithm for tackling it. Further, we extensively measure the performance limitations of realistic NFV deployments. Based on that, we propose an analytical model that accurately predict incurred operational costs. Then, we develop an optimal Intra-datacenter service chain deployment mechanism based on our cost model. Finally, we tackle the problem of monitoring service chains in NFV-based environments efficiently.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 323
Author(s):  
Marwa A. Abdelaal ◽  
Gamal A. Ebrahim ◽  
Wagdy R. Anis

The widespread adoption of network function virtualization (NFV) leads to providing network services through a chain of virtual network functions (VNFs). This architecture is called service function chain (SFC), which can be hosted on top of commodity servers and switches located at the cloud. Meanwhile, software-defined networking (SDN) can be utilized to manage VNFs to handle traffic flows through SFC. One of the most critical issues that needs to be addressed in NFV is VNF placement that optimizes physical link bandwidth consumption. Moreover, deploying SFCs enables service providers to consider different goals, such as minimizing the overall cost and service response time. In this paper, a novel approach for the VNF placement problem for SFCs, called virtual network functions and their replica placement (VNFRP), is introduced. It tries to achieve load balancing over the core links while considering multiple resource constraints. Hence, the VNF placement problem is first formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization problem, aiming to minimize link bandwidth consumption, energy consumption, and SFC placement cost. Then, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to find a near-optimal solution for this optimization problem. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The simulation results show that VNFRP can significantly improve load balancing by 80% when the number of replicas is increased. Additionally, VNFRP provides more than a 54% reduction in network energy consumption. Furthermore, it can efficiently reduce the SFC placement cost by more than 67%. Moreover, with the advantages of a fast response time and rapid convergence, VNFRP can be considered as a scalable solution for large networking environments.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyeon Jeong ◽  
Nguyen Van Tu ◽  
Jae-Hyoung Yoo ◽  
James Won-Ki Hong

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dashmeet Anand, Hariharakumar Narasimhakumar, Et al.

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is a capability that links multiple network functions to deploy end-to-end network services. By virtualizing these network functions also known as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), the dependency on traditional hardware can be removed, hence making it easier to deploy dynamic service chains over the cloud environment. Before implementing service chains over a large scale, it is necessary to understand the performance overhead created by each VNF owing to their varied characteristics. This research paper attempts to gain insights on the server and networking overhead encountered when a service chain is deployed on a cloud orchestration tool such as OpenStack. Specifically, this research will measure the CPU utilization, RAM usage and System Load of the server hosting OpenStack. Each VNF will be monitored for its varying performance parameters when subjected to different kinds of traffic. Our focus lies on acquiring performance parameters of the entire system for different service chains and compare throughput, latency, and VNF statistics of the virtual network. Insights obtained from this research can be used in the industry to achieve optimum performance of hardware and network resources while deploying service chains.


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