Cost Optimization in Security-Aware Service Function Chain Deployment with Diverse Vendors

Frequent cyber-attacks force the service provider to employ security-aware service functions (SFs) to accommodate client network requests. Thanks to virtualization techniques' maturity, a security-aware SF can be provided by diverse vendors with various configurations, each of which needs various implementation cost and provides different security levels. When a client's network request comes, the multi-configuration SFs could compose various security-aware service function chains (S-SFCs) to flexibly satisfy the security requirement. In this paper, we investigate how to efficiently compose and embed an S-SFC to satisfy the client's security requirement. With the objective of cost optimization, we formulate the problem of security-aware service function chain deployment and prove its NP-hardness. We propose the technique of the security-cost-balance (SCB) factor to efficiently consider the capability of a physical node and the cost when the node is employed to satisfy the client's security requirement. Based on this technique, we develop an efficient algorithm called SCB-based S-SFC deployment (SCB-SD). The simulation results show that SCB-SD significantly outperforms the benchmarks directly extended from the state-of-the-art.