Service Function Chain Survivability Provisioning in Fog Networks

Network function virtualization (NFV) technologies are being rapidly adopted across many enterprise and service provider networks to help replace costly, proprietary hardware systems. This paradigm runs virtual "softwarized" networking functions on low-cost off-the-shelf servers and can be used to construct highly-customized service function chains (SFC) for clients. NFV also offers many advantages at the network edge, and hence newer studies have started to look at SFC deployment in specialized fog computing domains, i.e., to support clients with stringent delay and localized contextual service needs. As these trends accelerate, there is a growing need to further address service survivability in these settings, particularly for clients with stringent/rapid failure recovery requirements. Hence this paper presents novel "on-demand" heuristic solutions and batch sorting methodologies for SFC service mapping and protection in fog domains. These schemes take into account key end-user client and operator concerns, including service delay, bandwidth, and node/link resource parameters.