Abstract Network function virtualization promises a significant advantage for addressing diverse quality of service requirements via chains of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Service Function Chain (SFC) mapping, composed of placing VNF in the physical network and routing traffic through them, is the key problem to meet the requirements. In the recent mission-critical applications, delay guarantee and fault tolerance are the crucial requirements wherein links and servers load balancing greatly facilitate providing the requirements. In this paper, we approach the problem of minimizing the maximum load of links and nodes in SFC mapping. After formulating the problem as a mixed-integer linear program, a batched version of the model is developed to estimate the optimal solution in a reasonable time. Then, we propose a practical solution based on the water-filling algorithm. Simulation results in different scenarios show that the algorithm can yield excellent performance compared to the optimal solution and benchmarks algorithms.

中文翻译：

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一种高效的服务功能链映射负载均衡方法

摘要 网络功能虚拟化有望通过虚拟网络功能 (VNF) 链解决不同的服务质量要求具有显着优势。服务功能链 (SFC) 映射由将 VNF 放置在物理网络中并通过它们路由流量组成，是满足要求的关键问题。在最近的关键任务应用中，延迟保证和容错是关键要求，其中链路和服务器负载平衡极大地促进了提供这些要求。在本文中，我们解决了在 SFC 映射中最小化链接和节点的最大负载的问题。在将问题制定为混合整数线性程序后，开发模型的批处理版本以在合理的时间内估计最优解。然后，我们提出了一种基于注水算法的实用解决方案。不同场景下的仿真结果表明，与最优解和基准算法相比，该算法可以产生出色的性能。