Reliability-aware service provisioning in NFV-enabled enterprise datacenter networks

Network Function Visualization (NFV) enables the complete decoupling of Network Functions (NFs) (e.g., firewall, intrusion detection, routing, etc.) from physical middleboxes used to implement service-specific and strictly ordered chains of these NFs. Precisely, NFV allows for dispatching NFs as plain software instances called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) running on virtual machines hosted by one or more industry standard physical machines. This, however, introduces vulnerabilities (e.g., hard-/soft-ware failures, etc) causing the break down of the entire VNF chain. The functionality of NFV-enabled networks impose higher reliability requirements than traditional networks. This paper encloses an in-depth investigation of a reliability-aware joint VNF placement and flow routing optimization problem. This problem is formulated as a complex Integer Linear Program (ILP). A heuristic is proposed in order to overcome this ILP's complexity. Thorough numerical analysis are conducted to verify and assert the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed heuristic.