Abstract

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is regarded as an important concept for next-generation communication networks because it can flexibly tackle diverse usage scenarios. Due to SFC requests’ life-cycle and resource adjustment, the distribution of the remaining physical resources may become unbalanced, which brings negative effects to subsequent SFC requests as well as network operators. In this paper, we investigate the network SFC migration problem in the core cloud under the premise of considering the migration cost and the balance of physical resource distribution. We first model the SFC migration problem as an integer linear program and propose an aggressive migration strategy that can effectively reduce the imbalance of physical resource distribution. Then, we employ two state-of-the-art heuristics to allocate resources for subsequent SFC requests. The simulation results show that migrating SFC requests in the initial service queue can bring favorable feedback to subsequent requests as well as network operators. Compared to the conservative migration strategy, our proposed migration strategy can mitigate the imbalance of physical resource distribution more effectively, and thus the acceptance ratio of subsequent SFC requests, physical resources utilization, and the long-term profit of network operators can be further improved.