Scaling and Placing Bidirectional Services with Stateful Virtual and Physical Network Functions

Network function virtualization requires scaling and placement, deciding the number and the location of function instances. Current approaches are limited in flexibility and practical applicability. Specifically, we study dynamic, single-step, joint scaling and placement of network services with bidirectional flows traversing Physical or Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and returning to their sources. We develop models to support stateful components and legacy network functions with fixed locations in these network services as well as the possibility of reusing VNFs across network services. We formalize the problem of jointly scaling and placing such network services as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). We show that this problem is NP-complete and also present a heuristic algorithm to find good solutions in short time. In an extensive evaluation with realistic scenarios, we investigate the capabilities of the two approaches.