Service Chain Provisioning With Sub-Chain-Enabled Coordinated Protection to Satisfy Availability Requirements.

This paper proposes a sub-chain-enabled coordinated protection model for the availability-guaranteed service function chain (SFC) provisioning, which considers the availability of each component to constitute an SFC, including links and VNFs. Unlike conventional protection models providing certain protection for the whole chain, the proposed model configures sub-chains for each SFC and provides proper protection for each sub-chain to achieve the required availability in a cost efficient way. We formulate the proposed model as an optimization problem to minimize the deployment cost. A game approach is presented to tackle the problem. The numerical results show that the proposed model outperforms the conventional ones in terms of deployment cost; the game approach has scalability of tackling the proposed model as the problem size increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]