Secure and Intelligent Service Function Chain for Sustainable Services in Healthcare Cyber Physical Systems

Abstract

The gradual integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has made the healthcare cyber physical systems (CPSs) ubiquitous and complex. Since IoT devices are heterogeneous, it is crucial to virtualize these devices in a general way so as to orchestrate and allocate their equipped functions and resources in a general manner. Network function virtualization (NFV) is the key networking technology towards the device virtualization. Within NFV, service function chain (SFC) is the crucial issue. While in real networking environment, physical device accidentally fails. How to guarantee the SFC, deployed on top of one or more failed devices, recover to work has not been well addressed yet. Hence, we research this issue, aiming at realizing the secure and sustainable SFC placement and scheduling in an intelligent manner. An intelligent SFC placement and scheduling framework, labeled as Sec-SFC-Intell, is proposed in this paper. When receiving a SFC request, the Sec-SFC-Intell will deploy the SFC on top of the healthcare CPSs. When the failure of certain one physical device is detected, the affected SFC will be re-placed and re-scheduled in order to recover to run and serve. In order to prove the feasibility and highlight the merits of Sec-SFC-Intell, simulation work is conducted. Compared with two compared benchmarks, Sec-SFC-Intell has an apparent SFC acceptance advantage of nearly 10%.