On service chaining using Virtual Network Functions in Network-enabled Cloud systems

Network functions (e.g., firewalls, load balancers, etc.) are traditionally implemented in hardware appliances and provide services to traffic flows. Since these functions are traditionally hardware-based, they make service innovation difficult in today's scenario of rapidly-increasing and evolving service demands. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is seen as a key enabler for service innovation as it virtualizes these network functions that can be therefore located more flexibly in the network. In this paper, we analyze network resource consumption in a Network-enabled Cloud (NeC) where the cloud-computing paradigm also comprises of network nodes in addition to the data center, by employing service chaining of Virtual Network Functions (VNF). Using an Integer Linear Program formulation, we study different NeC scenarios having varying number of network nodes. Our results indicate that scenarios with distributed NFV capability (as in NeC) can reduce network resource consumption.