Train Once Apply Anywhere: Effective Scheduling for Network Function Chains Running on FUMES

The emergence of network function virtualization has enabled network function chaining as a flexible approach for building complex network services. However, the high degree of flexibility envisioned for orchestrating network function chains introduces several challenges to support dynamism in workloads and the environment necessary for their realization. Existing works mostly consider supporting dynamism by re-adjusting provisioning of network function instances, incurring reaction times that are prohibitively high in practice. Existing solutions to dynamic packet scheduling rely on centralized schedulers and a priori knowledge of traffic characteristics, and cannot handle changes in the environment like link failures.

We fill this gap by presenting FUMES, a reinforcement learning based distributed agent design for the runtime scheduling problem of assigning packets undergoing treatment by network function chains to network function instances. Our design consists of multiple distributed agents that cooperatively work on the scheduling problem. A key design choice enables agents, once trained, to be applicable for unknown chains and traffic patterns including branching, and different environments including link failures. The paper presents the system design and shows its suitability for realistic deployments. We empirically compare FUMES with state-of-the-art runtime scheduling solutions showing improved scheduling decisions at lower server capacity.