Virtual Network Function Placement for Resilient Service Chain Provisioning

Virtualization technologies are changing the way network operators deploy and manage Internet services. In particular in this study we focus on the new Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, which consists in instantiating Virtual Network Function (VNFs) in Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COSTS) hardware. Adopting NFV network operators can dynamically instantiate Network Functions (NFs) based on current demands and network conditions, allowing to save capital and operational costs. Typically, VNFs are concatenated together in a sequential order to form Service Chains (SCs) that provide specific Internet Services to the users. In this paper we study different approaches to provide the resiliency of SCs against single-link and single-node failures. We propose three Integer Linear Programming (ILP) models to solve the VNF placement problem with the VNF service chaining while guaranteeing resiliency against single-node/link, single-link and single-node failures. Moreover we evaluate the impact of latency of SCs on the VNFs distribution. We show that providing resiliency against both single-link and single-node failures necessitates the activation of twice the amount of resources in terms of nodes, and that for latency critical services providing resiliency against single-node failures comes at the same cost with respect to resiliency against single-link and single-nodes failures.