Towards Service Function Chaining and Embedding for Multi-Security Guarantee Levels

In the emerging 5G networks, achieving security-aware data transmission needs to converting clients' requests into a service function chain (SFC), each service function (SF) of which provides a certain security guarantee level. As the virtualization technology is approaching to be mature, a service function may own multiple versions, whereas different versions provide various security guarantee levels with diverse costs. Thus, as more options are posted out by the multi-versions of SFs, establishing an SFC that meets the client's security guarantee level requirements becomes complex and challenging. In this paper, we study how to construct and embed a security-aware SFC onto a shared PN when multi-version SFs co-exist. We mathematically define this problem and name it security-aware service function chaining and embedding with multi-versions SFs (SFCE-MF). We prove this problem is NP-hard and proposes three critical heuristic algorithms to solve the problem, namely, security-first SF picking policy (SF -SP), cost-first SF picking policy (CF -SP) and security -cost balanced SF picking policy (SCB-SP). Our extensive simulations have shown that SCB-SP outperforms the other two regarding the variants of network size, the number of SF instances, and the security guarantee level requirements.