Incremental server deployment for NFV-enabled software defined networks
Xingpeng Fan, Hongli Xu, Gongming Zhao · 2022
The placement of virtual network functions (VNFs) has been widely studied. We motivate our research by the following two observations. First, in many situations, such as enterprise and edge networks, the hosting servers may not have been deployed for VNF placement. Second, some VNFs may only process/cover a partial set of flows (such as elephant flows) but still improve network performance. To take the above observations into consideration, we propose to incrementally deploy servers and place VNFs with explicit performance guarantee. We formally define the Incremental Server and Virtual Network Function Co-Placement (InSCOPE) problem. We prove the NP-hardness of the InSCOPE problem. The results of extensive simulation show high performance of our proposed algorithm. For example, our proposed algorithm can reduce the number of servers by about 50%.