A Markov Approximation-Based Approach for Network Service Chain Embedding

Pham Chuan, Minh N. H. Nguyen, Choong Seon Hong

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2017.44.7.719

To reduce management costs and improve performance, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) introduced the concept of network function virtualization (NFV), which can implement network functions (NFs) on cloud/datacenters. Within the NFV architecture, NFs can share physical resources by hosting NFs on physical nodes (commodity servers). For network service providers who support NFV architectures, an efficient resource allocation method finds utility in being able to reduce operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenses (CAPEX). Thus, in this paper, we analyzed the network service chain embedding problem via an optimization formulation and found a close-optimal solution based on the Markov approximation framework. Our simulation results show that our approach could increases on average CPU utilization by up to 73% and link utilization up to 53%.