Energy-efficient and traffic-aware service function chaining orchestration in multi-domain networks

Service function chaining (SFC) provisioning is helpful not only for saving the capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) of a network provider but also for reducing energy consumption in the substrate network. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been little research on the problem of energy consumption for orchestrating online SFC requests in multi-domain networks. In this paper, we first formulate the problem of an energy-efficient online SFC request that is orchestrated across multiple clouds as an integer linear programming (ILP) model to find an optimal solution. Then, we analyze the complexity of this ILP model and prove that the problem is NP-hard. Additionally, we propose a low-complexity heuristic algorithm named energy-efficient online SFC request orchestration across multiple domains (EE-SFCO-MD) for near-optimally solving the mentioned problem. Finally, we conduct simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Simulation results show that EE-SFCO-MD consumes less energy than existing approaches while the online SFC's requirements are met and the privacy of each cloud is effectively guaranteed. The low computational complexity of the heuristic approach makes it applicable for quickly responding to online SFC requests.