Joint Two-tier Network Function Parallelization on Multicore Platform

As Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is based on general purpose processors for avoiding any proprietary hardware, the benefits of NFV could be compromised by increased packet latency and reduced throughput. One feasible solution is to exploit new network function (NF) framework with aim of reducing the processing latency in NFs. In this paper, we propose a new joint Two-Tier NF Parallelization (TNP) framework, which can agilely and flexibly organize parallel NF processing and map individual NFs to one or multiple processing core(s). In TNP, we jointly design the parallelization of multiple NFs at service tier and the multicore mapping of individual NF at substrate network tier. We formulate the optimal TNP design problem as maximizing link bandwidth utilization subject to end-to-end latency and computing resource constraints. 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 the latency in NF processing and improve network throughput compared with single layer parallelization SFC framework.