Online Scaling of NFV Service Chains across Geo-distributed Datacenters
Yongzheng Jia, Chuan Wu, Zongpeng Li, Franck Le, and Alex Liu

TL;DR
This paper presents an online algorithm for dynamic placement and scaling of NFV service chains across geo-distributed datacenters, aiming to minimize operational costs amid time-varying traffic.
Contribution
It introduces a novel online approach combining regularization-based optimization and dependent rounding for efficient, cost-effective VNF deployment in dynamic environments.
Findings
The algorithm achieves a provably good competitive ratio.
Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the approach.
The method adapts well to realistic traffic variations.
Abstract
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that turns hardware-dependent implementation of network functions (i.e., middleboxes) into software modules running on virtualized platforms, for significant cost reduction and ease of management. Such virtual network functions (VNFs) commonly constitute service chains, to provide network services that traffic flows need to go through. Efficient deployment of VNFs for network service provisioning is key to realize the NFV goals. Existing efforts on VNF placement mostly deal with offline or one-time placement, ignoring the fundamental, dynamic deployment and scaling need of VNFs to handle practical time-varying traffic volumes. This work investigates dynamic placement of VNF service chains across geo-distributed datacenters to serve flows between dispersed source and destination pairs, for operational cost minimization of the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware-Defined Networks and 5G · Advanced Optical Network Technologies · Software System Performance and Reliability
