VNF placement for service chaining in a distributed cloud environment with multiple stakeholders

The adoption of virtualization technologies in networking is promoting a radical innovation in the way network services are managed and delivered. Indeed, some network services may be provisioned to cope with complex and unpredictable traffic demands by dynamically creating a sequence of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and steering traffic flows through them. In this context, the optimized deployment of network services, composed of VNFs that may be instantiated in multiple Data Centers (DCs), is one of the most challenging orchestration target. VNF placement is the problem of choosing the set of optimal locations for a chain of VNFs according to the service request and the current characteristics of available computing resources and network links. With respect to the state of the art, our original contribution reflects a multi-stakeholder perspective (subscriber, service providers, infrastructure providers) in a multi-DC environment. We thus consider the problem of placing VNFs to maximize primarily the number of accepted requests from a set of incoming requests and secondarily the satisfaction of subscribers’ preferences. Our model also allows to differentiate service requests in priority levels and guarantees that Quality of Service objectives for accepted service requests are fulfilled, including also a requirement on network service instantiation time. We provide an integer linear programming formulation of this problem that leverages a layered auxiliary graph built for each request in a set. Experimental evaluation is described in detail and an assessment of the proposed placement approach is performed along three main directions: (i) service acceptance ratio in online and offline placement, (ii) preferences’ satisfaction, and (iii) scalability expressed in terms of computational time. The performance of the approach is also compared to a greedy heuristic.