Traffic Prediction-Based VNF Auto-Scaling and Deployment Mechanism for Flexible and Elastic Service Provision

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides a flexible way to provision new services by decoupling network functions from hardware and implementing them as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). However, the rapid development of technologies greatly promotes the explosion of diverse services, which directly results in the exponential increase of heterogeneous traffic. In addition, such a tremendous amount of heterogeneous traffic will generate bursts in a more dynamic and unexpected manner, so it becomes extremely hard to satisfy the customer demands. Aiming at addressing these challenges, this work proposes a positive and elastic VNF deployment mechanism for service provisioning, which introduces three novelties: 1) a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based traffic prediction model is established to predict the unexpected and dynamically changing traffic behaviors in advance with the accuracy over 98%; 2) a closed-loop system is formed, in which the prediction model can learn and evolve continuously to respond to more complex scenarios; 3) different states of VNF are introduced and dynamically switched to deal with the current demands with reduced cost by avoiding frequent VNF initialization and destroy. The experimental results indicate that the proposed mechanism outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which include achieving over 98% prediction accuracy, improving the service acceptance rate by more than 18%, and reducing the overall cost by more than 20%.