Reliable Design Method for Service Function Chaining

SFC (Service Function Chaining) is one of the new service construction technologies in virtual network, and is a technology to construct a “service chain,” which is an idea to select and to connect VNF (Virtualized Network Function) - a network function separated from proprietary network equipment and virtualized to run on open architecture servers - in series to offer as single service. It is important to ensure high reliability of the service (service chain). In general, reliability improves by increasing redundancy of service components, such as network routes, network equipment, and applications, and for service chain, it is considered to adopt a method such as duplicating of service chains. However, when a VNF shared by multiple service chains fails, many users are affected because all service chains sharing the malfunctioning VNF are switched to a spare. This article proposes a design method to increase the reliability of service chain while suppressing the consumption of resources, by weighting VNF (component of the service chain) to choose important VNFs to be duplicated, according to the number of accommodated users and other indexes.