Year: 2026 | Month: June | Volume: 13 | Issue: 6 | Pages: 181-189
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20260618
A Lightweight Sla-Aware Framework for Virtual Network Function Placement in NFV Service Chains
Tran Ngoc Viet Anh
Administration Office, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, Ha Noi, Viet Nam.
Corresponding Author: Tran Ngoc Viet Anh
ABSTRACT
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has become an important approach for modernizing network infrastructure by decoupling network functions from dedicated hardware appliances and deploying them as software-based Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In an NFV environment, a network service is often implemented as a Service Function Chain (SFC), where traffic must traverse a sequence of VNFs such as firewall, intrusion detection, network address translation, and load balancing. The placement of these VNFs strongly affects end-to-end delay, resource utilization, bandwidth consumption, and the ability to satisfy service-level agreements (SLAs). Although many optimization-based approaches have been proposed, they may be unnecessarily complex for small and medium-scale NFV scenarios or for early-stage deployment planning. This paper presents a lightweight SLA-aware framework for VNF placement in NFV service chains. The proposed framework uses a simple multi-criteria scoring function based on available CPU, available memory, and estimated path delay. A small Python-based simulation was developed to compare the proposed method with two baseline strategies: random placement and first-fit placement. The simulated results indicate that the proposed method improves the service request acceptance ratio and reduces average end-to-end delay compared with the baselines under the examined scenarios. The study does not claim global optimality; rather, it demonstrates that a simple SLA-aware placement strategy can provide practical benefits while remaining transparent, reproducible, and easy to implement.
Keywords: Network Function Virtualization; Virtual Network Function; VNF Placement; Service Function Chain; SLA; Resource Allocation
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