Embedding Service Function Chains with Dedicated Protection in Edge Networks

Emerging machine learning techniques enable Internet-connected devices to generate service function chain (SFC) requests for reliability-sensitive applications. To facilitate reliable SFC provisioning, prior works have proposed the SFC dedicated protection approach for fog and cloud networks, which generally have abundant resources and connectivity. However, with limited resources and connectivity, it might be inefficient to directly employ these approaches at the network edge. In this work, we study how to efficiently embed and provide dedicated protection when accommodating SFCs at the network edge. We formally define the problem of SFC embedding with dedicated protection (SFCE-DP) to minimize the bandwidth resources usage at the network edge. Based on the proposed technique of augmenting path in a layered graph, we construct an efficient algorithm, called augmenting-path-based SFC embedding with dedicated protection (AP-SDP), to optimize SFCE-DP. When the network resources are limited, our results show that AP-SDP significantly outperforms the benchmark that is directly extended from the state-of-the-art.