Availability-Aware Service Chain Composition and Mapping in NFV-Enabled Networks

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology decouples network functions from hardware. Network service in NFV is deployed as a service chain, also known as Service Function Chain (SFC). SFC consists of an ordered set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). However, VNFs bring new challenges in providing network services with availability guarantee. In addition, in a customizable and dynamic NFV-enabled network, the composition and mapping of service chain are different from that of a traditional network. In this paper, we define an availability model that takes both hardware and VNF failures into consideration. Then we propose Joint Path-VNF backup model to combine path and VNF backup in a joint way. And a priority-based algorithm is designed for service chain composition and mapping. Simulation results show that our proposed solutions can reduce resource consumption while guaranteeing availability.