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Sum of squares: a new metric for NFV service chain placement in edge computing environments and efficient heuristic algorithms

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CCF Transactions on Networking

Abstract

Both network function virtualization (NFV) and edge computing (EC), especially the latter, are attracting more and more attention in recent years. A growing number of network service providers are migrating their services from the cloud to the edge for better QoS services, while the recent researches on NFV also concentrate on deploying NFV services in edge computing networks. However, NFV deployment in edge networks is a troublesome challenge and is fairly alien from conventional NFV deployment problems in data centres. Edge network differs from the data center network in the following two aspects: firstly, edge nodes are constrained in computing capacity, and secondly, the network connections between edge nodes are unstable and dynamic, which may show large variance over time. This means edge computing should be designed for high-efficient use of physical edge nodes’ resources. To address the challenges above, we investigate a new NFV Service Chain Placement problem in edge computing environments (NSCP-EC) in this paper. We first prove that the NSCP-EC problem is NP-complete. Then we propose a new metric which can better measure the capacity utilization rate of physical resources, and analyze its advantages with details. Based on the new metric, we propose two heuristic but efficient algorithms called MINI and MINI-tree. To confirm the performance of the two algorithms, we conduct simulations. The result demonstrates that MINI gains an advantage over genetic algorithm (GA) and MINI-tree orevails over MINI in tree topology conditions in the aspects of physical resource utilization, acceptance rate and running time. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm the feasibility of the algorithms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB1001801), NSFC (61872175), Jiangsu NSF (BK20181252), CCF-Tencent Open Fund, Ministry of Education & China Mobile Research Foundation (MCM20170307) and Collaborative Innovation Center of Novel Software Technology and Industrialization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Lab. for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing , P.R. China

    Zhiqi Chen, Sheng Zhang, Zhuzhong Qian, Can Wang & Sanglu Lu

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology/Suzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Mingjun Xiao

  3. Center for Networked Computing, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA

    Jie Wu

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  1. Zhiqi Chen
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  2. Sheng Zhang
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Correspondence to Sheng Zhang.

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Chen, Z., Zhang, S., Qian, Z. et al. Sum of squares: a new metric for NFV service chain placement in edge computing environments and efficient heuristic algorithms. CCF Trans. Netw. 3, 140–153 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42045-020-00030-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42045-020-00030-1

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