VNF Management with Model Predictive Control for Service Chains
Masaya Kumazaki, Masaki Ogura, Takuji Tachibana · 2019
By using Network Function Virtualization (NFV), several kinds of network functions can be provided in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. Such network function is called Virtual Network Function (VNF). In terms of the utilization of VNFs, an emerging technology called service chaining enables network operators to provide network services dynamically and flexibly. Here, the number of VNF instances should be managed dynamically according to the amount of traffic. In this paper, we propose a dynamic management of VNF instances with Model Predictive Control (MPC) for multiple service chains. In the proposed method, the number of VNF instances is changed dynamically according to the predicted amount of traffic. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method and threshold method with simulation. In numerical examples, it is shown that the proposed method can avoid data loss with a small number of VNF instances.