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Virtual network function placement with bounded migrations

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Abstract

With the penetration of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), network functions, traditionally deployed as proprietary physical equipment like firewalls, Network Address Translations (NATs), are gradually being implemented as software and deployed on standardized hardware. One of the crucial challenges in this paradigm is how to place the software implemented network functions to minimize the number of used physical servers. In this paper, we study the problem of how to optimally place Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in networks where it is allowed to migrate already placed VNFs to decrease used servers. We first formulate the offline problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, and then propose a semi-online algorithm to solve the online variant of the problem. We name the proposed algorithm Semi-onlIne Vnf plAcement (SIVA). In particular, SIVA is based on a bin packing algorithm that solves online bin packing problem while taking care of migrations. According to our theoretical analysis, SIVA migrates at most \(\lambda\) VNFs each step, and it has Asymptotic Competitive Ratio (ACR) of 3/2 if \(k \rightarrow \infty\), where \(\lambda = k \cdot |N|\), k is a tunable parameter, and \(|N|\) is the the number of supported VNF types. We conduct extensive numerical simulations to evaluate the performances of SIVA. The experiment results validate the theoretical analysis and show that SIVA outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by achieving near-optimal performance with minor VNF migrations.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by NSFC Fund (61671130, 61301153, 612711656, 61671124), 973 Program (2013CB329103), Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team (PCSIRT) in University, the 111 Project (B14039), and Project on Public Safety Risk Prevention and Control and Emergency Technical Equipment (2018YFC0831002).

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  1. The School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, People’s Republic of China

    Yanghao Xie, Sheng Wang & Binbin Wang

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  1. Yanghao Xie
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  2. Sheng Wang
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Correspondence to Yanghao Xie or Sheng Wang.

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Xie, Y., Wang, S. & Wang, B. Virtual network function placement with bounded migrations. Cluster Comput 24, 2355–2366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-021-03266-8

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