Slice-Based Service Function Chain Embedding with Multiple Factors

Abstract

Network slicing is a promising technology to provide various services on a common physical network infrastructure. A network slice is a logical virtual network composed of a group of service function chains (SFCs) and the network operator performs SFC embedding (SFCE) to create and orchestrate network slices. Compared to conventional SFCE, implementing slice-based SFCE (SBSFCE) faces some new challenges like diversified requirements of SFCs, inter-slice and intra-slice VNF sharing, and slice priority-based admission control due to the introduction of slice dimension. In this paper, we study the SBSFCE problem jointly considering the above challenges. We formulate the problem and devise a dynamic programming-based heuristic, SBSEA to solve it. The simulation results demonstrate that SBSEA outperforms the existing solution and achieves near-optimal performance.