Joint Two-Tier Network Function Parallelization on Multicore Platform

• Published in: IEEE eTransactions on network and service management Vol. 16; no. 3; pp. 990 - 1004
• Main Authors: Liu, Mengjie, Feng, Gang, Zhou, Jianhong, Qin, Shuang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Computation; Mapping; Multicore processing; NFV; Noise measurement; Parallel processing; parallelization; Processors; Program processors; Resource allocation; SDN; service function chain; Substrates; Throughput
• ISSN: 1932-4537; 1932-4537
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2019.2920012

As network function virtualization (NFV) is realized based on general-purpose processors for avoiding proprietary hardware, its benefits of flexibility and agility could be compromised by the increased packet latency and reduced throughput. An effective approach for improving the latency and throughput performance is to exploit new network function (NF) processing framework on general purpose processors. In this paper, we propose a new joint two-tier NF parallelization (TNP) framework, which can agilely and flexibly organize parallel NF processing to greatly improve the latency and throughput performance of service function chain (SFC) which is constituted by a set of NFs. In TNP, we jointly organize the parallelization of multiple NFs at the service tier and perform multicore mapping of individual NFs at the substrate network tier. We formulate the optimal TNP design problem as minimizing link bandwidth consumption subject to end-to-end latency and computing resource constraints. We solve the problem by decomposing it into two easier subproblems: 1) subproblem 1 (SP1) is to solve the optimal SFC parallelization graph design in conjunction with link mapping problem and 2) subproblem 2 (SP2) is to jointly solve computing resource allocation in conjunction with node mapping problem. The global optimal solution is accomplished by searching in a set of feasible regions in sequence. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed TNP can significantly decrease service latency and improve network throughput compared with known single layer NF parallelization schemes. Moreover, the link bandwidth utilization and SFC request acceptance rate in the substrate network can also be greatly improved.