An approach for service function chain routing and virtual function network instance migration in network function virtualization architectures

Network function virtualization foresees the virtualization of service functions and their execution on virtual machines. Any service is represented by a service function chain (SFC) that is a set of VNFs to be executed according to a given order. The running of VNFs needs the instantiation of VNF Instances (VNFIs) that in general are software modules executed on virtual machines. The virtualization challenges include: 1) where to instantiate VNFIs; ii) how many resources to allocate to each VNFI; iii) how to route SFC requests to the appropriate VNFIs in the right sequence; and iv) when and how to migrate VNFIs in response to changes to SFC request intensity and location. We develop an approach that uses three algorithms that are used back-to-back resulting in VNFI placement, SFC routing, and VNFI migration in response to changing workload. The objective is to first minimize the rejection of SFC bandwidth and second to consolidate VNFIs in as few servers as possible so as to reduce the energy consumed. The proposed consolidation algorithm is based on a migration policy of VNFIs that considers the revenue loss due to QoS degradation that a user suffers due to information loss occurring during the migrations. The objective is to minimize the total cost given by the energy consumption and the revenue loss due to QoS degradation. We evaluate our suite of algorithms on a test network and show performance gains that can be achieved over using other alternative naive algorithms.