A Framework for Provisioning Availability of NFV in Data Center Networks

Network function virtualization is a promising technique to greatly improve the effectiveness and flexibility of network services through a process named service function chain (SFC) mapping, with which network functions are deployed over virtualized and shared platforms in data centers. However, failures are quite common in data centers. Therefore, a practical and yet theoretically challenging issue in SFC mapping in such an environment is to manage the availability of the requests. In this paper, we present a framework to provision availability of SFC requests in a data center with multiple layers of connected devices, and the devices follow heterogeneous failure processes with the objective of minimizing resource usage. To expedite the process, we further propose an optimization problem of request mapping and backup estimation and solve it efficiently with an approximation algorithm. With simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.