QoS-driven function placement reducing expenditures in NFV deployments

Petra Vizarreta, Massimo Condoluci, Carmen Mas Machuca, Toktam Mahmoodi, Wolfgang Kellerer
2017 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)  
With Network Function Virtualization (NFV), network functions are deployed as modular software components on the commodity hardware, and can be further chained to provide services. Network operators offer different classes of services to their users and their requirements are specified in Service Level Agreements (SLA) which include several QoS performance parameters such as the maximum tolerated delay or the minimum availability. So far, state of the art solutions for NFV deployment focus on
more » ... lay related requirements. However, service availability, which is an important requirement for any SLA is mostly neglected. This paper focuses on the placement of virtualized network functions, with the target to support service differentiation in terms of delay and availability while minimizing the associated costs. We present two solutions: an ILP formulation and an efficient heuristic to obtain near optimal solution. Considering a national core network case study, we show that the proposed function placement solutions are able to guarantee both delay and availability requirements, and imply only a limited increase of used network resources, compared to solutions that only address a single requirement. Finally, we show that the execution time of the proposed heuristic scales well with the size of the problem.
doi:10.1109/icc.2017.7996513 dblp:conf/icc/VizarretaCMMK17 fatcat:c7m44aucunfnxeryf35sbnbsqe