Network service chains deployment across multiple SDN domains

Abstract

The integration of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) enables the flexible deployment of network services and significant reduction in service provisioning cost. In particular, SDN, as a new networking paradigm, supports the flexible provisioning of new network services. Meanwhile, in NFV, the service request from end user can be represented as the service function chain (SFC). However, with the continuously increasing of network users and constant enlargement in network scale, the deployment of network services in the large-scale SDN network, which is composed of multiple SDN domains, becomes more challenging since these SDN domains are managed and maintained by different network operators and service providers. To address the above challenge, in this paper, we study the problem of how to deploy network services across multiple SDN domains optimally. Specifically, we first formulate this problem as an optimization problem by jointly minimizing the total number of SDN domains occupied by SFCs and the corresponding network resource consumption cost. We propose a novel heuristic deployment algorithm to solve this optimization problem. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic deployment algorithm is effective and outperforms the comparison algorithms in terms of the total service cost. KEYWORDS multidomain network, network service deployment, SDN, SFC Int J Commun Syst. 2018;31:e3826.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac

Dynamic network service deployment across multiple SDN domains

“…To reduce end‐to‐end latency, Xu et al explored the problem of security function chain embedding across multiple domains and formulated it as two ILP models with the goal of latency minimization. Our previous work focused on network SFC deployment across multiple SDN domains to minimize service cost.…”

“…We mathematically formulate this problem as a multiobjective optimization model with two different goals of minimizing total resource consumption cost and operating cost, respectively. Similar to most existing works, [10][11][12][13][14]16,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][31][32][33] we transform the multiobjective optimization problem into a single objective optimization problem and base on Dijkstra algorithm to design a heuristic service deployment approach to solve it.…”

“…However, different from multidomain SDN network, it is difficult for the multidomain network or multicloud network to achieve flexible and scalable deployment of network service chain due to lack of centralized control capacity. Moreover, the dynamic natures of user service demand are not considered in most existing works . Most current proposals are efficient and useful for the static network SFC deployment.…”

“…Moreover, the dynamic natures of user service demand are not considered in most existing works. [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Most current proposals are efficient and useful for the static network SFC deployment. It is difficult to meet dynamic service demand of end user, especially in multidomain SDN network scenarios.…”

An Energy-driven Network Function Virtualization for Multi-domain Software Defined Networks

“…Thus, the service provisioning across these networks requires the collaboration among different SDN controllers which results in additional network overhead. However, the deployment of network services across multi-domain SDNs is still in its early phases [16]. Further, the deployment of network services in multi-domain SDN networks requires an efficient allocation of resources for different service requests at a reduced cost.…”