HASFC: a MANO-compliant Framework for Availability Management of Service Chains

TL;DR

HASFC is a framework that helps telecom service providers deploy highly available service function chains by balancing redundancy costs and availability, using probabilistic models and selection algorithms.

Contribution

The paper introduces HASFC, a MANO-compliant framework that optimizes availability and cost trade-offs for service chains through probabilistic modeling and redundancy selection.

Findings

Successfully models SFC node failures and repairs.

Effectively selects optimal redundancy configurations.

Demonstrated on multimedia service use case.

Abstract

Most softwarized telco services are conveniently framed as Service Function Chains (SFCs). Indeed, being structured as a combination of interconnected nodes, service chains may suffer from the single point of failure problem, meaning that an individual node malfunctioning could compromise the whole chain operation. To guarantee "highly available" (HA) levels, service providers are required to introduce redundancy strategies to achieve specific availability demands, where cost constraints have to be taken into account as well. Along these lines we propose HASFC (standing for High Availability SFC), a framework designed to support, through a dedicated REST interface, the MANO infrastructure in deploying SFCs with an optimal availability-cost trade off. Our framework is equipped with: i) an availability model builder aimed to construct probabilistic models of the SFC nodes in terms of failure and repair actions; ii) a chaining and selection module to compose the possible redundant SFCs, and extract the best candidates thereof. Beyond providing architectural details, we demonstrate the functionalities of HASFC through a use case which considers the IP Multimedia Subsystem, an SFC-like structure adopted to manage multimedia contents within 4G and 5G networks.