A customizable agile approach to Network Function Placement

This paper deals with servicing Virtual Network Function (VNF) chaining requests in a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) based system. This is also referred to as the Network Function Placement (NFP) problem. Existing solutions to this problem are slow and not suitable for deployment as dynamic NFP-solvers in networks. In this paper, we first propose an NFP solution that uses a divide-and-conquer approach, with a complexity similar to that of existing solutions. We show that the solution is complete and sound. Next, we propose ways to customize our solution to obtain an agile version that trades off precision for significantly lower time-complexity. The proposed algorithm is analyzed for various system parameters and it is shown to be scalable for large data center network (DCN) topologies.