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Speedy and Efficient Service Chaining and Function Placement Based on Lagrangian Heuristics for Capacitated Shortest Path Tour Problem

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Abstract

Network functions virtualization (NFV) can realize flexible and diverse network services by replacing the conventional network equipment with the combination of virtual network functions (VNFs) and commodity servers. A certain network service can be composed of a sequence of VNFs, i.e., service (function) chain. The service chaining (SC) problem aims to establish an appropriate service path from the origin node to the destination node, which holds both the resource constraints and service chain requirements of executing the required VNFs in the designated order. SC belongs to the complexity class NP-hard. In the previous work, inspired by the similarity between the SC problem and the shortest path tour problem (SPTP), we showed the capacitated SPTP (CSPTP) based ILP for the SC problem, where CSPTP is a generalized version of the SPTP with both the node and link capacity constraints. In this paper, we propose Lagrangian heuristics to solve the CSPTP-based ILP for the SC in a speedy and efficient manner. We further present that the proposed heuristics can also solve both the service chaining and function placement by slightly extending the network model called an augmented network. Through numerical results, we show that the proposed heuristics for the SC is competitive with the optimal resource allocation while executing much faster than the combination of the CSPTP-based ILP and the existing solver, i.e., CPLEX. Furthermore, we also show that the proposed heuristics for both the service chaining and function placement can still balance the solution optimality and computational complexity, thanks to the parallel computation architectures.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI under Grant 22H03586, 19K11942, and 21K21288, Japan.

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  1. T. Hara and M. Sasabe have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5 Takayama-cho, Ikoma, Nara, 630-0192, Japan

    Takanori Hara & Masahiro Sasabe

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  1. Takanori Hara
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  2. Masahiro Sasabe
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Contributions

TH and MS made contributions to the conception and design of the work. TH implemented the simulator for the experiments and conducted the evaluations. As for the manuscript, TH prepared all the figures and both TH and MS contributed to writing and reviewing the whole part of the manuscript. All authors approved the version to be published.

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Correspondence to Takanori Hara.

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This article is an extended version of the paper presented at the 2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (IEEE NOMS 2022) [21].

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Hara, T., Sasabe, M. Speedy and Efficient Service Chaining and Function Placement Based on Lagrangian Heuristics for Capacitated Shortest Path Tour Problem. J Netw Syst Manage 31, 24 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-022-09715-y

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