The Intelligent Multi-Domain Service Function Chain Deployment: Architecture, Challenges And Solutions

Network function virtualization (NFV) technology achieves flexible service deployment by replacing the middleboxes with virtual network functions (VNFs). In NFV, a set of VNFs are chained in a given order, called service function chain (SFC), and accordingly, data flow is steered to traverse all the VNFs in order to offer a service. With a large number of network devices and end users being connected into Internet, there is a growing demand for large-scale multi-domain networks to dynamically deploy the SFC across multiple network domains, in order to support efficient service provisioning. To this end, in this paper, we first investigate the state of the art of multi-domain SFC deployment, and then propose an intelligent multi-domain SFC deployment (IMSD) architecture by leveraging software-defined networking (SDN), NFV, and deep learning technologies. Furthermore, we discuss the potential challenges to realize the IMSD and provide some promising solutions.