Energy-Efficient Service Function Chain Provisioning

Description

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a promising network architecture concept to reduce operational costs. In legacy networks, network functions, such as firewall or TCP optimization, are performed by specific hardware. In networks enabling NFV coupled with the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm, Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) can be implemented dynamically on generic hardware. This is of primary interest to implement energy efficient solutions, in order to adapt the resource usage dynamically to the demand. In this paper, we study how to use NFV coupled with SDN to improve the energy efficiency of networks. We consider a setting in which a flow has to go through a Service Function Chain, that is several network functions in a specific order. We propose an ILP formulation, an ILP-based heuristic, as well as a decomposition model that relies on joint routing and placement configuration to solve the problem. We show that virtualization provides between 22% to 62% of energy savings for networks of different sizes.

Abstract

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