Latency-Aware Service Function Chain Placement in 5G Mobile Networks

The 5th generation mobile network (5G) is expected to support numerous services with versatile quality of service (QoS) requirements such as high data rates and low end-to-end (E2E) latency. It is widely agreed that E2E latency can be significantly reduced by moving content / computing capability closer to the network edge. However, since the edge nodes (i.e., base stations) have limited computing capacity, mobile network operators shall make a decision on how to provision the computing resources to the services in order to make sure that the E2E latency requirement of the services are satisfied while the network resources (e.g., computing, radio, and transport network resources) are used in an efficient manner. In this work, we employ integer linear programming (ILP) techniques to formulate and solve a joint user association, service function chain (SFC) placement, and resource allocation problem where SFCs, composed of virtualized service functions (VSFs), represent user requested services that have certain E2E latency and data rate requirements. Specifically, we compare three variants of an ILP-based algorithm that aim to minimize E2E latency of requested services, service provisioning cost, and VSF migration frequency, respectively. We then propose a heuristic in order to address the scalability issue of the ILP-based solutions. Simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm.

[1]  Hai Liu,et al.  Minimum latency server selection for heterogeneous cloud services , 2014, 2014 IEEE Global Communications Conference.

[2]  Swades De,et al.  Joint VNF Placement and CPU Allocation in 5G , 2018, IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[3]  Navid Nikaein,et al.  5G Architectural Design Patterns , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC).

[4]  Raouf Boutaba,et al.  Delay-aware VNF placement and chaining based on a flexible resource allocation approach , 2017, 2017 13th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM).

[5]  Albert Banchs,et al.  Mobile network architecture evolution toward 5G , 2016, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[6]  Abdallah Shami,et al.  Orchestrating network function virtualization platform: Migration or re-instantiation? , 2017, 2017 IEEE 6th International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet).

[7]  Anass Benjebbour,et al.  Design considerations for a 5G network architecture , 2014, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[8]  Vasilis Friderikos,et al.  Low latency virtual network embedding for mobile networks , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[9]  Roberto Riggio,et al.  Trade-offs in Cache-enabled Mobile Networks , 2018, 2018 14th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM).

[10]  Zhisheng Niu,et al.  A Cooperative Scheduling Scheme of Local Cloud and Internet Cloud for Delay-Aware Mobile Cloud Computing , 2015, 2015 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps).

[11]  Weifa Liang,et al.  Throughput Maximization of Delay-Sensitive Request Admissions via Virtualized Network Function Placements and Migrations , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[12]  Liang Tong,et al.  A hierarchical edge cloud architecture for mobile computing , 2016, IEEE INFOCOM 2016 - The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[13]  Chadi Assi,et al.  Delay-Aware Scheduling and Resource Optimization With Network Function Virtualization , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Communications.

[14]  Tilman Wolf,et al.  Mapping of delay-sensitive virtual networks , 2014, 2014 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC).

[15]  Piero Castoldi,et al.  Latency-aware composition of Virtual Functions in 5G , 2015, Proceedings of the 2015 1st IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft).

[16]  Dario Pompili,et al.  Understanding the Computational Requirements of Virtualized Baseband Units Using a Programmable Cloud Radio Access Network Testbed , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC).

[17]  Huaiyu Dai,et al.  A Survey on Low Latency Towards 5G: RAN, Core Network and Caching Solutions , 2017, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.