Two-stage metaheuristic for reliable and balanced network function virtualization-enabled networks

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a contemporary network architecture concept that integrates complex network functions into software-based virtual network functions (VNFs) instead of specialized hardware. Resource allocation for multiple service function chain requests (SFC) in NFV-enabled networks is a fundamental challenge for network providers. Several research studies have focused on this problem in detail. Specifically, SFC routing attempts to satisfy each request by assigning a path across data centers that places the ordered set of required VNFs. This paper formulates this problem as an SFC provisioning problem (SFCRP) with the two objectives of maximizing the number of accepted requests and balancing the utilization of network resources. To address this problem, a two-stage routing algorithm (2PRT) that integrates Yen’s algorithm and a genetic algorithm is proposed. The simulation results based on 12 scenarios that use three real-world networks and randomly generated requests indicate that the batch mode significantly enhances the acceptance rate compared to the existing methods.