Scheduling Reconfigurable Service Function Chain

Abstract

Network function virtualization (NFV), has been widely adopted in existing networks since it brings lower capital expenditure and operating expense, as well as flexible and elastic deployment. Based on NFV, dynamic Service function chain (SFC) provides more comprehensive and thorough traffic steering over a series of middleboxes, e.g., DPI, and IDS. Nevertheless, dynamic SFC involves internal state migration in middleboxes, making it hard to allocate SFC requests. We propose a reconfigurable SFC scheduling approach with consideration on resource constraints and race of the state migration to collaborate the execution of the SFC reconfiguration, in the reasonable fashion based on a heuristic algorithm. The evaluation is conducted through discrete event simulation to validate the efficiency of our reconfigurable SFC scheduling, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms First Come First Serve scheduling and random scheduling.