Composing and deploying parallelized service function chains

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides great flexibility in solving the problem of deploying service function chains (SFCs). The existing serial SFCs organize virtual network functions (VNFs) in a predefined order and execute the VNFs one by one, which can result in high SFC delay as the lengths of the SFCs increases. In order to address this problem, in this work, the SFC parallelization is adopted to accelerate the SFCs. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of deploying parallelized SFCs. Specifically, a distributed NFV architecture is used to implement parallelized SFCs, and an effective algorithm is developed to parallelize serial SFCs based on the VNF dependency. Further, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to deploy the parallelized SFCs onto a distributed network with the objective to minimize the average SFC delay. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the SFC delay, increase the utilization efficiency of node resources, and obtain a high acceptance rate of user requests.