A Novel and Secure Service Function Chains Embedding Framework for NFV-Enabled Networks

Recently, network function virtualization (NFV) technology is strongly emphasized by the telecommunication industry, aiming at virtualizing physical resources, providing more agile and high-quality virtual network services and reducing telecommunication provider costs. In NFV environment, each network service (NS) is usually represented by a sequences of service function chains (SFCs). The issue of SFC composition, embedding and scheduling is regarded as the key issue in NFV research. Most of previous researchers focus on solving SFC embedding (SFC-E) problem and proposing effective embedding algorithms. Correspondingly, there exist dozens of embedding publications in the literature. However, few researchers studied the secure SFC-E problem. Hence, we research this topic and discuss the typical security risks in NFV-enabled networks. Then, we propose one novel and secure framework, labeled as No-Sec-SFC-E, in this paper. The goal of No-Sec-SFC-E is to ensure secure network function deployment and resource allocation in NFV-enabled networks. In No-Sec-SFC-E framework, virtual network functions (V-NFs), having high security probabilities, are usually preferred. With the aiming of validating the proposed No-Sec-SFC-E framework, we conduct the experiment. Recorded experiment results vividly reveal the feasibility and effectiveness of No-Sec-SFC-E.