Service Chain Rerouting for NFV Load Balancing

Network function virtualization (NFV), with its potential to facilitate network service provisioning, has drawn growing interest from both academia and industry. One essential challenge is to allocate efficiently the bandwidth and computational resources to the service requests. In an online context, service chain requests may arrive, depart or evolve in an arbitrary fashion, adding more difficulty to the problem. Service chain reconfiguration may help improve the performance by individually rerouting a subset of the service chain requests. In this paper, we propose a new service chain reconfiguration framework to achieve load balancing in an NFV environment under varying levels of support from the underlying infrastructure. We show that our framework can achieve an approximation ratio of O(ln m/ In In m) with high probability for the service chain request rerouting problem.