Considerations for a Successful Network Service Chain Deployment

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) along with the Service Chaining paradigm have changed the way that network services are deployed in the underlying network infrastructure. The decoupling of network functions from dedicated middleboxes into software entities has led the Service Providers to offer highly specialized services tailored to the needs of the end users. However, in order to achieve the high performance that the expensive hardware appliances can guarantee, an efficient virtualized network functions (VNF) deployment should be performed. This paper proposes a novel VNF placement approach with the goal to minimize the deployment cost and maximize the achieved throughput. Results reveal the need of considering the throughput degradation when consolidating multiple VNFs on the same server in order to increase the overall performance.