ABSTRACT The emergence of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) facilitates policy-driven and dynamic service function chaining (SFC). In recent years, multi-domain SFC orchestration has attracted a significant attention, as it is a complicated problem involving many issues, such as corporation of various administrations and integration of heterogeneous underlying technologies. However, as another critical problem for multi-domain SFC deployment, how to achieve context-aware service provision is still not widely discussed. Thus, in this paper, based on the hierarchical SFC architecture, we allocate metadata to share context information of packets and realize context-based and dynamic SFC in multi-domain networks. We design typical use cases and conduct related experiments about locationaware flow steering and denial of service attack elimination. Experimental results confirm the feasibility and elasticity of our proposed approach. Furthermore, to alleviate the resource over-provisioning problem of context-aware SFC orchestration, we propose a consolidation-based SF placement and chaining algorithm with an online feedback mechanism. We compare the performance of our algorithm with a related greedy algorithm and a tabu search algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient to reduce the reject rate and improve the revenue-cost ratio, with a compromise on node load balance. INDEX TERMS Context-aware, SFC, multi-domain networks.
Li et al. REF realized context-based and dynamic SFC over multi-domain networks by allocating metadata to share context information of packets among those networks.
Context-Aware Service Function Chaining and Its Cost-Effective Orchestration in Multi-Domain Networks
IEEE Access
IEEE Access
Computer Science