A Scalable Stateful Approach for Virtual Security Functions Orchestration
Niloofar Moradi, Alireza Shameli‐Sendi, Alireza Khajouei · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems · 2021
Previous works suggested different approaches to implementing service chaining. Their goal is to enhance the performance of the middleboxes and satisfy the expectations of the cloud providers and users. To meet these expectations, the delay factor, i.e., flow through the low-cost paths, as well as the best node processing factor, are considered. Achieving these two goals simultaneously turns the middlebox optimal placement into an NP-hard problem. Therefore, when the problem size is large, it is infeasible to obtain an optimal solution at a reasonable time. One of the important issues which has not been considered in the previous works is stateful optimal placement when receiving a new request. Due to resource constraints as well as financial costs for the customers, it is not possible to create functions for all requests. Therefore, not only it is possible to integrate the same network functions between new flows, but it will also be examined between new on-demand network functions as well as existing ones. Our proposed approach not only reduces the creation of network functions that can be cost-effective for the customer but also because of the migration of previous network functions (integration with on-demand network functions) to optimize new requests, overall, it will optimize the entire network cost over time. We formulated the problem as 0-1 programming problem. The results of this article are based on a fat-tree data center. To show that our stateful solution is scalable in large networks, we use network zoning and topology partitioning heuristics. Our simulations show that we were able to scale our placement model to a network with 54K nodes and 1.5M edges.