Section: New Results

Constraint Programming

Participants : Maurizio Gabbrielli, Liu Tong.

In Focus, we sometimes make use of constraint solvers (e.g., cloud computing, service-oriented computing). Since a few years we have thus began to develop tools based on constraints and constraint solvers.

In [39] we have used constraints in the setting of Service Function Chaining (SFC) deployment. SFCs represent sequences of Virtual Network Functions that compose a service. They are found within Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies, that recently acquired a great momentum thanks to their promise of being a flexible and cost-effective solution for replacing hardware-based, vendor-dependent network middleboxes with software appliances running on general purpose hardware in the cloud.

We employ constraint programming to solve the SFC design problem. Indeed we argue that constraint programming can be effectively used to address this kind of problems because it provides expressive and flexible modeling languages which come with powerful solvers, thus providing efficient and scalable performance.