Volume 7 - Issue 3
AutoVNF: An Automatic Resource Sharing Schema for VNF Requests
- Wei Huang
School of Computer Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing 211167, China
wweihuang@sina.com.cn
- Haoren Zhu
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
haoren zhu@dislab.nju.edu.cn
- Zhuzhong Qian
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
qzz@nju.edu.cn
Keywords: virtual network function, resource sharing, service function chain
Abstract
Nowadays, network function virtualization (NFV) receives widespread concerns from the whole society
for its promising application. The main challenge for the deployment of VNF that comes
along is the resource allocation of demanded network services in NFV-based network infrastructures.
Current offline resource mapping and scheduling algorithms are impractical for continuous
VNF requests in data centers, because of the high time consumption. In this paper, we firstly present
a resource sharing schema for VNF, including the automatic monitoring and fast switching mechanisms,
which support multiple VNFs effectively share resource in one node. This VNF resource
sharing schema improves the acceptance ratio of VNF requests as well as the system utilization. And
then, we propose an automatic NFV resource allocation mechanism AutoVNF to optimize the VNF
deployment. AutoVNF includes mapping and scheduling algorithms, which automatically allocates
available nodes to VNF requests and schedules the execution of VNFs in one VNF queue. Simulations
show that AutoVNF has a good performance on acceptance ratio, average flow time, and total
cost compared with well-known scheduling algorithms.