학술논문

A Latency-Driven Availability Assessment for Multi-Tenant Service Chains
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on. 16(2):815-829 Apr, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Containers
Cloud computing
IP networks
Steady-state
Software
Maintenance engineering
Computational modeling
Availability
reliability
queueing model
container virtualization
IP multimedia subsystem
redundancy optimization
multi-state systems
universal generating function
network function virtualization
Language
ISSN
1939-1374
2372-0204
Abstract
Nowadays, most telecommunication services adhere to the Service Function Chain (SFC) paradigm, where network functions are implemented via software. In particular, container virtualization is becoming a popular approach to deploy network functions and to enable resource slicing among several tenants. The resulting infrastructure is a complex system composed by a huge amount of containers implementing different SFC functionalities, along with different tenants sharing the same chain. The complexity of such a scenario lead us to evaluate two critical metrics: the steady-state availability (the probability that a system is functioning in long runs) and the latency (the time between a service request and the pertinent response). Consequently, we propose a latency-driven availability assessment for multi-tenant service chains implemented via Containerized Network Functions (CNFs). We adopt a multi-state system to model single CNFs and the queueing formalism to characterize the service latency. To efficiently compute the availability, we develop a modified version of the Multidimensional Universal Generating Function (MUGF) technique. Finally, we solve an optimization problem to minimize the SFC cost under an availability constraint. As a relevant example of SFC, we consider a containerized version of IP Multimedia Subsystem, whose parameters have been estimated through fault injection techniques and load tests.