English

Robust Online Composition, Routing and NF Placement for NFV-enabled Services

Networking and Internet Architecture 2020-02-11 v1

Abstract

Network function virtualization (NFV) fosters innovation in the networking field and reduces the complexity involved in managing modern-day conventional networks. Via NFV, the provisioning of a network service becomes more agile, whereby virtual network functions can be instantiated on commodity servers and data centers on demand. Network functions can be either mandatory or best-effort. The former type is strictly necessary for the correctness of a network service, whereas the latter is preferrable yet not necessary. In this paper, we study the online provisioning of NFV-enabled network services. We consider both unicast and multicast NFV-enabled services with multiple mandatory and best-effort NF instances. We propose a primal-dual based online approximation algorithm that allocates both processing and transmission resources to maximize a profit function, subject to resource constraints on physical links and NFV nodes. The online algorithm resembles a joint admission mechanism and an online composition, routing and NF placement framework. The online algorithm is derived from an offline formulation through a primal-dual based analysis. Such analysis offers direct insights and a fundamental understanding on the nature of the profit-maximization problem for NFV-enabled services with multiple resource types.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.03464,
  title  = {Robust Online Composition, Routing and NF Placement for NFV-enabled Services},
  author = {Omar Alhussein and Weihua Zhuang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.03464},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

To appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:35:57.662Z