Stringer: Balancing Latency and Resource Usage in Service Function Chain Provisioning

Network function virtualization (NFV) enables telecommunications infrastructure providers to replace special-purpose networking equipment with commodity servers running virtualized network functions (VNFs). A provider using NFV faces the service function chain (SFC) provisioning problem of assigning VNF instances to nodes in the physical infrastructure, and routing SFCs in the physical network. The provider must balance competing goals of performance and resource usage. This article presents an approach to SFC provisioning, called Stringer, which lets providers balance the conflicting goals of minimizing infrastructure resources and end-to-end latency for meeting their respective service-level agreements.