Network function virtualization (NFV), with its perceived potential to accelerate service deployment and to introduce flexibility in service provisioning, has drawn a growing interest from industry and academia alike over the past few years. One of the key challenges in realizing NFV is the service chain routing problem, whereby traffic must be routed so as to traverse the various components of a network service that have been mapped onto the underlying network. In this work, we consider the online service chain routing problem. We route the service chain with the goal of jointly minimizing the maximum network congestion and the number of hops from the source to the destination. To this end, we present a simple yet effective online algorithm in which the routing decision is irrevocably made without prior knowledge of future requests. We prove that our algorithm is $O(\log m)$ -competitive in terms of congestion minimization, where $m$ is the number of edges of the underlying network topology, and we show that this ratio is asymptotically optimal.

中文翻译：

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考虑路径长度的服务链路由问题的拥塞最小化

网络功能虚拟化（NFV）具有加速服务部署并在服务供应中引入灵活性的潜力，在过去几年中，引起了业界和学术界的越来越多的关注。实现NFV的主要挑战之一是服务链路由问题，其中必须对流量进行路由，以遍历已映射到基础网络的网络服务的各个组件。在这项工作中，我们考虑在线服务链路由问题。我们路由服务链的目的是共同最大程度地减少最大的网络拥塞以及从源到目的地的跳数。为此，我们提出了一种简单而有效的在线算法，其中路由决策是不可撤销的，无需事先了解未来的请求。 $ O（\ log m）$ -在最小化拥塞方面具有竞争力 $ m $ 是基础网络拓扑的边数，我们证明该比率是渐近最优的。