Profit Maximization of Online Service Function Chain Orchestration in an Inter-Datacenter Elastic Optical Network

To meet the increasing traffic demands characterized by large bandwidth and high burstiness, more traffic has been moving to inter-datacenter elastic optical networks (inter-DC EONs) for processing. The integration of two emerging paradigms, network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN), enables Internet service providers (ISPs) to deploy service function chains (SFCs) from users flexibly while reducing operational and capital expenditures. This article focuses on the problem of online SFC provisioning in inter-DC-EONs with the aim of maximizing ISP profits, where the challenge in jointly allocating IT and spectrum resources when deploying SFCs is balanced with the deployment costs of processing as many user requests as possible. We design two-phase time-efficient orchestration algorithms for online SFC requests and the strategy of SFC splitting is adopted to improve the utilization of spectrum resources on fiber links. Simulation results show that, compared with the existing algorithm, our proposed algorithms significantly shorten the deployment time, improve total profit of ISP by up to 40% and reduce the blocking probability by up to 35%.