Abstract
Nowadays, service function chaining (SFC) becomes more and more widespread and profound to implement flexible and economical virtual network infrastructures for the Internet of Things (IoT). With the benefits of SFC, the IoT service providers can steer massive traffic through a sequence of heterogeneous virtual network function instances based on their business logic. SFC is viewed as an attractive solution for building virtualized IoT-dedicated network. However, the SFC orchestration in IoT is still a challenge problem. Existing work usually focuses on the performance guarantee while ignoring the issue of resource idleness. To meet the sharp increase in IoT traffic amounts and the diversification of IoT traffic requirements, it is necessary to implement the performance and resource aware SFC orchestration system. Motivated by this, we propose a novel linear programming model and an effective approximation optimization algorithm for SFC orchestration, in order to achieve performance guarantee while avoiding resource idleness. Based on the proposed model and algorithm, a new prototype system named performance and resource aware orchestration system of SFC for IoT (PRSFC-IoT) is built upon OpenStack for online SFC orchestration. A large number of simulation experiments show that the PRSFC-IoT outperforms existing solutions for SFC orchestration in IoT.