Network function virtualization (NFV) is a new networking paradigm based on decoupling network functions from dedicated hardware, so these network functions can be run as pieces of software on general-purpose computation servers, which are called virtual network functions. In addition to guarantee the service qualities provided by NFV networks comparable to those provided by traditional telecommunication networks, energy consumption becomes one of the challenges faced by NFV. This is due to a large number of general computation servers that consume a significant amount of energy. We address here the problem of how to provide an energy-aware service function chaining (SFC) embedding in NFV networks with a hierarchical resource allocation, where an SFC has a set of virtual network functions to be executed in a specific sequential order providing a specific network service. Assuming a dynamic traffic scenario, we introduce for this new problem an integer linear programming (ILP) and three polynomial heuristic algorithms for resource allocation. All three heuristic algorithms achieve energy savings by shutting down idle devices and balance the tradeoff between energy cost and SFC request acceptance ratio. Numerical results demonstrate the quality of the proposed heuristic algorithms in terms of acceptance ratio by comparing them with the ILP method and a method extended from an exiting algorithm despite the fact that they save energy.

中文翻译：

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NFV 网络中嵌入的能源感知服务功能链


网络功能虚拟化（NFV）是一种基于将网络功能与专用硬件解耦的新型网络范式，因此这些网络功能可以作为软件运行在通用计算服务器上，称为虚拟网络功能。除了保证NFV网络提供与传统电信网络相当的服务质量外，能源消耗也成为NFV面临的挑战之一。这是由于大量的通用计算服务器消耗了大量的能源。我们在这里解决的问题是如何通过分层资源分配提供嵌入 NFV 网络中的能源感知服务功能链 (SFC)，其中 SFC 具有一组虚拟网络功能，以特定的顺序执行，提供特定的功能。网络服务。假设一个动态流量场景，我们针对这个新问题引入了整数线性规划（ILP）和三个用于资源分配的多项式启发式算法。所有三种启发式算法都通过关闭空闲设备来实现节能，并平衡能源成本和 SFC 请求接受率之间的权衡。数值结果通过与 ILP 方法和现有算法扩展的方法进行比较，证明了所提出的启发式算法在接受率方面的质量，尽管它们节省了能量。