Joint Network Function Deployment and Route Selection for Energy Consumption Optimization in SDN
Xizheng Yang, Rong Chai, Leilei Huang, Lei Zhang, Chengli Mei · 2020
As a novel network paradigm, software-defined networking (SDN) is expected to offer flexible network configuration and management by leveraging centralized logical management and decoupling data plane from control plane. In SDN, to achieve efficient flow forwarding between source switches and destination switches, route selection strategy is mandatory. Furthermore, in order to meet the application requirements of user flows, a number of network functions might be required while transmitting user flows through the network. In this paper, we study the problem of joint network function deployment and route selection for multiple user flows in SDN. To stress the importance of energy consumption required for transmitting and processing user flows, we formulate the joint network function deployment and route selection problem as an energy consumption minimization problem. Since the formulated optimization problem is an NP-hard problem which is difficult to solve, we propose a priority-based heuristic algorithm, which first determines the priority of user flows according to their resource requirements, then, based on the priorities of user flows, the joint network function deployment and route selection strategy is designed for individual user flows by applying a multi-stage graph-based Dijkstra algorithm. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.