On vNF-SC deployment and task scheduling for bulk-data transfers in inter-DC EONs

We study how to deploy vNF service chains (vNF-SCs) and perform task scheduling for bulk-data transfers in inter-datacenter (inter-DC) elastic optical networks (EONs). We call this type of request a data-intensive vNF-SC request. According to the number of required vNF-SCs, the data-intensive vNF-SC requests are classified into linear and multi-branch data-intensive vNF-SC requests. For linear data-intensive vNF-SC requests, we propose a dynamic-programming-based vNF-SC deployment and task scheduling algorithm to minimize the average service completion time (SCT). For multi-branch data-intensive vNF-SC requests, we propose a correlation-aware vNF-SC deployment and task scheduling algorithm to minimize the average SCT, since there are multiple vNF-SC branches that are correlated and the SCT of a multi-branch data-intensive vNF-SC request is determined by the SCT of the latest vNF-SC branch. Simulation results verify that our algorithms can reduce the average SCTs of data-intensive vNF-SC requests of the two types effectively.