Off-Site Service Function Protection for Type-Oriented Forwarder Failures
Chengzong Peng, Danyang Zheng, Ben Wang, Xiaojun Cao · 2023
In network function virtualization (NFV), service providers can accommodate services from clients by deploying software-based functions, called service functions (SFs), on commodity servers. The deployed SFs are connected to SF forwarders for efficient management in these commodity servers. Many efforts have been put into protecting SFs from failures. However, little attention has been paid to protecting SF forwarders from failures. In this paper, we investigate how to efficiently allocate backup computing resources when facing SF and SF forwarder failures. To protect the deployed SFs with the minimum backup computing resources, we define a new SF forwarder off-site shared protection problem and approve its NP-hardness. An efficient heuristic algorithm is proposed and proved to be logarithmic approximate. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the approaches directly extended from the existing work.