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Network Service Chaining (NSC) is a service concept which promises increased flexibility and cost-efficiency for future carrier networks. The two recent developments, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), are opportunities for service providers to simplify the service chaining and provisioning process and reduce the cost (in CAPEX and OPEX) while introducing new services as well. One of the challenging tasks regarding NFV-based services is to efficiently map them to the components of a physical network based on the services specifications/constraints. In this paper, we propose an efficient cost-effective algorithm to map NSCs composed of Network Functions (NF) to the network infrastructure while taking possible decompositions of NFs into account. NF decomposition refers to converting an abstract NF to more refined NFs interconnected in form of a graph with the same …