Online Control of Service Function Chainings Across Geo-Distributed Datacenters

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides the possibility to implement complex network functions from dedicated hardware to software instances called Virtual Network Functions (VNF) by leveraging the virtualization technology. Service Function Chaining (SFC) is therefore defined as a chain-ordered set of placed VNFs that handles the traffic of the delivery and control of a specific application. Due to the advantages of flexibility, efficiency, scalability, and short deployment cycles, NFV has been widely recognized as the next-generation network service provisioning paradigm. In this paper, we study the problem of online SFC control across geo-distributed datacenters, which is to dynamically place required VNFs on datacenter nodes and find routing paths between each adjacent VNF pair for each NFV service flow that varies over time. To that end, we first formulate this problem as an offline optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the average delay such that each datacenter's average cost does not exceed a given expense value. Considering that the offline optimization requires complete offline network information which is difficult to obtain or predict in practice, we present an online SFC control framework without requiring any future information about the traffic demands. More specifically, we leverage the Lyapunov optimization technique to formulate the problem as a series of one-time slot offline optimization problems and then apply a primal-decomposition method to solve each one-time slot problem. Simulation results reveal that our proposed online SFC control framework can efficiently reduce long-term average delay while keeping datacenter's long-term average cost consumption low.