Multi-Resource VNF Deployment in a Heterogeneous Cloud

The emerging paradigm of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) promises to shorten the renewal cycles of network functions and reduce the capital expenses by flexibly deploying virtualized network functions (VNFs) implementation on commodity servers. However, the required resource of each type (CPU, memory, etc.) for the running VNF should be provisioned to guarantee the performance when processing packets. This comes with different deployment cost, especially in a heterogeneous cloud consisting of a large number of network function platforms from various vendors. To optimally operate VNFs, it is necessary for the network operator to dynamically deploy VNFs in the expensive cloud infrastructures. In this article, we initiate the study of minimizing the deployment cost under multi-resource constraints in a heterogeneous cloud. We formulate multi-resource VNF deployment problem (MVDP) as an optimization program and prove its hardness. We propose an offline (1, d + 1)-bicriteria approximation algorithm and an (O(1), O(n . log n))-competitive online algorithm to deploy VNFs in a scalable manner, where d is the number of resource types and n is the number of required VNFs. Large-scale simulations and DPDK-based OpenNetVM implementation show that our algorithms can reduce the overall cost by 34% and improve the performance in terms of multi-resource allocation.