A Reinforcement-Learning Self-Healing Approach for Virtual Network Function Placement
Marios Avgeris, Aris Leivadeas, Ioannis Lambadaris · 2023
Modern networking paradigms like Service Function Chaining (SFC) allow for services to be broken down to a series of ordered and interconnected Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) that can be hosted in generic servers in EdgeCloud datacenters. Nonetheless, a critical issue arises, when a hardware or software failure occurs and the VNFs of an SFC need to be repositioned, allowing to autonomously bring the system back to its normal operation, a process called self-healing. In this paper, a distributed methodology is proposed that aims to address this challenge, considering the requirements of all involved actors. Specifically, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based algorithm is proposed that allows to iteratively optimize and determine an SFC healing solution upon a datacenter failure. As a second stage, a revenue-driven resource allocation mechanism is integrated, to resolve the contention for resources in an already functional datacenter that potentially occurs due to the repositioning. Various simulation scenarios prove the efficiency of our proposed resilient healing mechanism.