IoT-centric Service Function ChainingOrchestration and its Performance Validation

In order to simplify deployment and management of IoT services, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Service Function Chaining (SFC) are promising solutions, and much researchers have conducted these topics. To enhance the reliability of former research efforts, in this paper, we propose an orchestration framework for IoT-centric SFC by using Docker and Kubernetes. The framework enables an automatic IoT service deployment by satisfying service requirements and computing and network resource constraints. In such deployment, we apply a Virtual Network Function (VNF)/Service Function (SF) placement problem to achieve efficient utilization of the resources. We set an objective function as minimizing both numbers of SF instances and communications and build a mathematical model based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP). To validate it, we implement a model for the framework and evaluate the performances by carrying out a numerical evaluation and a real experiment. From the evaluation results, we confirm that the proposed approach can reduce the number of SF placements and the number of communications among SF instances.