Load-balanced Service Function Chaining in Edge Computing over FiWi Access Networks for Internet of Things

Service function chaining (SFC) is promising to implement flexible and scalable virtual network infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). Edge computing is envisioned to be an effective solution to process huge amount of IoT application data. In order to uniformly provide services to IoT applications among the distributed edge computing nodes (ECNs), we present a unified SFC orchestration framework based on the coordination of SDN and NFV, which provides a synergic edge cloud platform by exploiting the connectivity of FiWi access networks. In addition, we study the VNF deployment problem under our synergic framework, and we formulate it as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem jointly considering the load balancing of networking and computing for chaining VNFs. We also propose two approximation optimal deployment algorithms named Greedy-Bisection Multi-Path (GBMP) and KSP MultiPath (KSMP) taking advantage of the multi-instance virtual network functions (VNFs) deployed in ECNs and the multipath capacity in FiWi access networks. Extensive simulations are conducted in two types of IoT application scenarios in the EC over FiWi access networks. The numerical results show that our proposed algorithms are superior to single path and ECMP based deployment algorithms in terms of load balancing, service acceptance ratio, and network utilization in both two typical scenarios.