Service Deployment Model on Shared Virtual Network Functions With Flow Partition

Network operators can operate services in a flexible way with virtual network functions thanks to the network function virtualization technology. Flow partition allows aggregated traffic to be split into multiple parts, which increases the flexibility. This paper proposes a service deployment model with flow partition to minimize the service deployment cost with meeting service delay requirements. A virtual network function of a service is allowed to have several instances, each of which hosts a part of flows and can be shared among different services, to reduce the initial and proportional cost. We provide the mathematical formulation for the proposed model and transform it to a special case as a mixed integer second-order cone programming (MISOCP) problem. A heuristic algorithm, which is called a flow partition heuristic (FPH), is introduced to solve the original problem in practical time by decomposing it into several steps; each step handles a convex problem. We compare the performances of proposed model with flow partition and conventional model without flow partition. We consider the formulated MISOCP problem with adopting a strategy of even splitting to divide flows in a special case, which is called an even spitting heuristic (ESH). The performances of FPH and ESH are compared in a realistic scenario. We also consider the formulated MISOCP problem as an original problem and compare it to an FPH-based heuristic algorithm with the even-splitting strategy (FPH-ES), in both realistic and synthetic scenarios. The numerical results reveal that the proposed model saves the service deployment cost compared to the conventional one. It improves the maximum admissible traffic scale by 23% in average in our examined cases. We observe that FPH outperforms ESH and ESH outperforms FPH-ES in terms of the service deployment cost in their own focused problems, respectively.