BeNNS: A Surrogate Model for Hybrid Online-Offline Evolution of SFC Embedding

Service Function Chains (SFCs) enable programmatic control of the functions and services in a computer network. By leveraging Software Defined Networking to control the links between virtualised network functions, SFCs provide a scalable approach to dealing with the increased pressures on network operation and management. Unfortunately, the challenge of embedding SFCs onto the underlying physical network and compute infrastructure is an NP-hard problem. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) have been used to address this issue, but they require significant time to evaluate solution quality (fitness) \textit{online}, with most solutions instead adopting \textit{offline} simulations or analytical evaluations.