Recursive Service Function Chain Orchestration.

Current orchestration platforms are more than ca-pable of scheduling microservices but the scheduling Service Function Chains (SFC) of network service are not well addressed. In this paper, we focus on the SFC scheduling for microservices and aim to achieve the recursive usage of microservices which is a single microservice serving multiple SFC simultaneously. We propose an extension to the ESTI MANO stack based on a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm. It allows microservices to serve multiple SFCs simultaneously in an environment similar to the popular container orchestration platform Kubernetes without interfering with existing horizontal scalers. We developed our simulation based on the popular cloud computing simulation tool CloudSim Plus and benchmarked our algorithm against the other four simple algorithms inspired by existing works. The results show our proposed algorithm guarantees the feasibility of generated schedule. With the sacrifice of latency for individual SFC, the overall completion time and power usage of the host can be reduced up to 43%.

I. Introduction

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging critical technology that adds agility to deploy any new services to satisfy the rapidly growing demands from business applications. [1]. Earlier, these business applications used the monolithic architecture which is limited to vertical scaling of their allocated computational resources. To overcome issues with a monolithic architecture, the microservices architecture has gained interest in recent years [1]. Micro-service is a lightweight container-based software that is designed to complete a specific task or support a functionality. The microservice-based Virtual Network Function (VNF) will allow network operators to choose which component or functionalities to be (de-)activated or scaled based on application needs according to scenarios.