HASFC: A MANO-Compliant Framework for Availability Management of Service Chains

Most softwarized telco services are conveniently framed as service function chains (SFCs). Indeed, being structured as a combination of interconnected nodes, service chains may suffer from the single point of failure problem, meaning that an individual node malfunctioning could compromise the whole chain operation. To guarantee highly available (HA) levels, service providers are required to introduce redundancy strategies to achieve specific availability demands, where cost constraints have to be taken into account as well. Along these lines we propose HASFC, a framework designed to support, through a dedicated REST interface, the MANO infrastructure in deploying SFCs with an optimal availability/cost trade-off. Our framework is equipped with: an availability model builder aimed to construct probabilistic models of the SFC nodes in terms of failure/repair actions; and a chaining and selection module to compose the possible redundant SFCs, and extract the best candidates thereof. Beyond providing architectural details, we demonstrate the functionalities of HASFC through a use case that considers the IP Multimedia Subsystem, an SFC-like structure adopted to manage multimedia contents within 4G/5G networks.