Thanks to the increased availability of computing capabilities in data centers, the recently proposed virtual network function paradigm can be used to keep up with the increasing demand for network services as internet and its applications grow. The problem arises then of managing the virtual network functions, that is, to decide where to instantiate the functions and how to route the demands to reach them. While it arises in an application field, the Virtual Network Function placement and routing problem combines location and routing aspects in an interesting, challenging problem. In this paper, we propose several ILP-based heuristics and compare them on a dataset that includes instances with different sizes, network topologies, and service capacity. The heuristics prove effective in tackling even large size instances, with up to 50 nodes and more than 80 arcs.

中文翻译：

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虚拟网络功能布局和路由问题的基于 ILP 的启发式算法

由于数据中心计算能力的可用性增加，最近提出的虚拟网络功能范式可用于满足随着互联网及其应用程序的增长对网络服务不断增长的需求。然后出现管理虚拟网络功能的问题，即决定在何处实例化功能以及如何路由需求以到达它们。虽然它出现在应用领域，但虚拟网络功能布局和路由问题在一个有趣的、具有挑战性的问题中结合了位置和路由方面。在本文中，我们提出了几种基于 ILP 的启发式方法，并在包含不同大小、网络拓扑和服务容量的实例的数据集上对它们进行了比较。启发式算法在处理大型实例时证明是有效的，