COMPARE: Comparative Advantage driven resource allocation for Virtual Network Functions

As Communication Service Providers (CSPs) adopt the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm they need to transition their network function capacity to a virtualized infrastructure with different Network Functions (NFs) running on a set of heterogeneous servers. This paper describes a novel technique for allocating server resources (compute, storage and network) for a given set of Virtual Network Function (VNF) requirements. Our approach helps the telecommunication providers decide the most effective way to run several VNFs on servers with different performance characteristics. Our analysis of prior VNF performance characterization on heterogeneous/different server resource allocations shows that the ability to arbitrarily create many VNFs among different servers' resource allocations leads to a comparative advantage among servers. We propose a VNF resource allocation method called COMPARE that maximizes the total throughput of the system by formulating this resource allocation problem as a comparative advantage problem among heterogeneous servers. There are several applications for using the VNF resource allocation from COMPARE including transitioning current Telco deployments to NFV based solutions and providing initial VNF placement for Service Function Chain (SFC) provisioning. We use analytic proof and illustrative examples to demonstrate optimality of COMPARE algorithm.