Specifying and placing chains of virtual network functions

By Sevil Mehraghdam, Matthias Keller, Holger Karl. 2014 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet), 2014

558 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Network appliances perform different functions on network flows and constitute an important part of an operator's network. Normally, a set of chained network functions process network flows. Following the trend of virtualization of networks, virtualization of the network functions has also become a topic of interest. We define a model for formalizing the chaining of network functions using a context-free language. We process deployment requests and construct virtual network function graphs that can be mapped to the network. We describe the mapping as a Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Program (MIQCP) for finding the placement of the network functions and chaining them together considering the limited network resources and requirements of the functions. We have performed a Pareto set analysis to investigate the possible trade-offs between different optimization objectives.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91eeba4be8ac919704c1c8f6516852ab526c1d57

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

A survey on service function chaining (2016, background): “Scheduling schemes are presented in [85, 86] for the placement of network functions so that the resource utilization can be optimized.”
Resource Allocation in NFV: A Comprehensive Survey (2016, methodology): “[56] formulate a context-free language for formalizing the chaining requests.”
Network Function Virtualization: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges (2015, methodology): “In addition to placement, Mehraghdam [157] proposes a model for formalizing the chaining of NFs.”
Virtual network functions placement and routing optimization (2015, background): “Similarly, authors in [5] propose a VNF chaining placement that combines location-routing and VNE problems, solving ﬁrst the placement and then the chaining.”
Orchestrating Virtualized Network Functions (2015, background): “[32] proposed a grammar for specifying VNF chains and then provided a mathematical formulation for VNF chain placement.”
On orchestrating virtual network functions (2015, methodology): “Table I lists the parameters used for servers, VNFs, and middleboxes.”
Deploying chains of virtual network functions: On the relation between link and server usage (2016, background): “However, to better utilize resources, we allow different service requests to share a single VM [9] if its capability c m is sufficient.”