Joint Correlation-Aware VNF Selection and Placement in Cloud Data Center Networks

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) brings great flexibility and scalability to the deployment of network services by decoupling network functions from dedicated devices, which has attracted more attention from both academia and industry. Network services in NFV are deployed in the form of Service Function Chain (SFC), which consists of multiple ordered Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). However, how to effectively place VNFs remains a problem to be solved. In this paper, we investigate joint correlation-aware VNF selection and placement problem. We first formulate the problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem and propose a method based on self-learning matrix to partition VNF correlation. Then, we design a Joint Correlation-aware VNF Placement (JCVP) algorithm based on Dynamic Programming to transform the problem into several VNF mapping subproblems. Extensive simulation results show that compared with the previous algorithms our approach has better performance in link occupancy, SFC acceptance, and VNF utilization rate.