A QoS Assured Network Service Chaining Algorithm in Network Function Virtualization Architecture

Abstract

In the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture, Network Service Chaining (NSC) is consisted in a certain order of network elements so that it can provide flexible network services to users. Due to the complexity of network infrastructure, creating a service chain requires high operation cost especially in carrier-grade network service providers and supporting stringent QoS requirements is also a challenge. Although several vendors provide various solutions for the NSC, there is only few information and the detailed algorithm or implementation logic is hidden. This paper presents an NSC algorithm in NFV that assures QoS from the perspective of service providers. In order to formulate NSC path selection problem, we apply the NP complete genetic algorithm. The evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm minimizes the operation cost of service providers by approximately 10.6% while the requested QoS targets is not violated.