Disaster Protection for Service Function Chain Provisioning in EO-DCNs

Network function virtualization (NFV) in Elastic Optical Inter-DataCenter Networks (EO-DCNs) enables a flexible, adaptive, effective, and economic network services deployment and upgrade. However, it is facing critical threats from large-scale network failures due to natural disasters. This is driving the need for efficient network protection schemes of service function chain (SFC) provisioning. In this paper, we investigate the disaster-resilient SFC provisioning problem leveraging power-efficient path protection with distance-adaptive modulation format (MF) assignment, concerning virtual network function (VNF) placement, SFC mapping, path protection, constrained recovery delay, and spectrum allocation simultaneously. An integer linear program (ILP) model is formulated to jointly minimize power consumption and spectrum usage, subject to disaster resilience. A heuristic algorithm is further developed for the sake of scalability. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed disaster protection schemes enable saving up to 32.05% power consumption.