Adaptive multipath routing for network functions virtualization
Thi-Thuy-Lien Nguyen, Tuan-Minh Pham, Huỳnh Thị Thanh Bình · 2016
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a recent trend of network transformation that helps service providers offer new and multiple services in a more agile and cost effective way. However, the softwarization and cloudization of network functions can result in high congestion and low network performance for virtual networks. We develop a multipath routing solution for minimizing the maximum link utilization, thus leading to the performance improvement of NFV-based systems, as well as the efficient utilization of network resources. Our proposed algorithm can adapt the link weight system to the dynamic change of service demands for optimizing the distribution of network traffic, with regard to the fundamental NFV characteristics and the Equal-cost Multipath (ECMP) routing feature. The evaluation results show that the proposed solution outperforms a multipath solution with fixed link weight on various performance metrics. Interestingly, we find that the network performance is not significantly improved by increasing the number of paths beyond a threshold.