GREP: Guaranteeing Reliability with Enhanced Protection in NFV

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a promising technique to greatly improve the effectiveness and flexibility of network management through a process called Service Function Chain (SFC) mapping, which can efficiently provision network services over a virtualized and shared middlebox platform. However, such an evolution towards software-defined middlebox introduces new challenges to network services which require high reliability. Sufficient redundancy can protect the network services when physical failures occur, but in doing so, the efficiency of physical resources may be greatly decreased. This paper presents GREP, a novel online algorithm that can minimize the physical resources consumption while guaranteeing the required high reliability with a polynomial time complexity. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve the request acceptance ratio and reduce resource consumption.