Impact of the maximum number of switching reconfigurations on the cost saving in network function virtualization environments with elastic optical interconnection

Network Function Virtualization is based on the virtualization of the network functions and it is a new technology allowing for a more flexible allocation of cloud and bandwidth resources. In order to employ the flexibility of the technology and to adapt its use according to the traffic variation, reconfigurations of the cloud and bandwidth resources are needed by means of both migration of the Virtual Machines executing the network functions and reconfiguration of circuits interconnecting the Virtual Machines. The objective of the paper is to study the impact of the maximum number of switch reconfigurations on the cost saving that the Networking Function Virtualization technology allows us to achieve. The problem is studied in the case of a scenario with an elastic optical network interconnecting datacenters in which the Virtual Machines are executed. The problem can be formulated as an Integer Linear Programming one introducing a constraint on the maximum number of switch reconfigurations but due to its computational complexity we propose a low computational complexity heuristic allowing for results close to the optimization ones. The results show how the limitation on the number of possible reconfigurations has to be taken into account to evaluate the effectiveness in terms of cost saving that the Virtual Machine migrations in Network Function Virtualization environment allows us to achieve.