Multi-access edge computing (MEC) has recently been proposed to aid mobile end devices in providing compute- and data-intensive services with low latency. Growing service demands by the end devices may overwhelm MEC installations, while cost constraints limit the increases of the installed MEC computing and data storage capacities. At the same time, the ever increasing computation capabilities and storage capacities of mobile end devices are valuable resources that can be utilized to enhance the MEC. This article comprehensively surveys the topic area of device-enhanced MEC, i.e., mechanisms that jointly utilize the resources of the community of end devices and the installed MEC to provide services to end devices. We classify the device-enhanced MEC mechanisms into mechanisms for computation offloading and mechanisms for caching. We further subclassify the offloading and caching mechanisms according to the targeted performance goals, which include throughput maximization, latency minimization, energy conservation, utility maximization, and enhanced security. We identify the main limitations of the existing device-enhanced MEC mechanisms and outline future research directions.

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Device-Enhanced MEC: Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) Aided by End Device Computation and Caching: A Survey

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging paradigm that turns hardware-dependent implementation of network functions (i.e., middleboxes) into software modules running on virtualized platforms, for significant cost reduction and ease of management. Such virtual network functions (VNFs) commonly constitute service chains, to provide network services that traffic flows need to go through. Efficient deployment of VNFs for network service provisioning is key to realize the NFV goals. Existing efforts on VNF placement mostly deal with offline or one-time placement, ignoring the fundamental, dynamic deployment and scaling need of VNFs to handle practical time-varying traffic volumes. This work investigates dynamic placement of VNF service chains across geo-distributed datacenters to serve flows between dispersed source and destination pairs, for operational cost minimization of the service chain provider over the entire system span. An efficient online algorithm is proposed, which consists of two main components: (1) A regularization-based approach from online learning literature to convert the offline optimal deployment problem into a sequence of one-shot regularized problems, each to be efficiently solved in one time slot; (2) An online dependent rounding scheme to derive feasible integer solutions from the optimal fractional solutions of the one-shot problems, and to guarantee a good competitive ratio of the online algorithm over the entire time span. We verify our online algorithm with solid theoretical analysis and trace-driven simulations under realistic settings.

Online Scaling of NFV Service Chains across Geo-distributed Datacenters

The efficient deployment of virtual network functions (VNFs) for network service provisioning is key for achieving network function virtualization (NFV); however, most existing studies address only offline or one-off deployments of service function chains (SFCs) while neglecting the dynamic (i.e., online) deployment and expansion requirements. In particular, many methods of energy/resource cost reduction are achieved by merging VNFs. However, the energy waste and device wear for large-scale collections of servers (e.g., cloud networks and data centers) caused by sporadic request updating are ignored. To solve these problems, we propose an energy-aware routing and adaptive delayed shutdown (EAR-ADS) algorithm for dynamic SFC deployment, which includes the following features: 1) energy-aware routing (EAR): by considering a practical deployment environment, a flexible solution is developed based on reusing open servers and selecting paths with the aims of balancing energy and resources and minimizing the total cost and 2) adaptive delayed shutdown (ADS): the delayed shutdown time of the servers can be flexibly adjusted in accordance with the usage of each device in each time slot, thus eliminating the no-load wait time of the servers and frequent on/off switching. Therefore, the EAR-ADS can achieve dual-energy savings by both decreasing the number of open servers and reducing the idle/switching energy consumption of these servers. The simulation results show that EAR-ADS not only minimizes the cost of energy and resources but also achieves an excellent success rate and stability. Moreover, EAR-ADS is efficient compared with an improved Markov algorithm (SAMA), reducing the average deployment time by more than a factor of 40.

Energy-Efficient Provisioning for Service Function Chains to Support Delay-Sensitive Applications in Network Function Virtualization

A comprehensive survey of service function chain provisioning approaches in SDN and NFV architecture

Recently, network function virtualization (NFV) has been proposed to solve the dilemma faced by traditional networks and to improve network performance through hardware and software decoupling. The deployment of the service function chain (SFC) is a key technology that affects the performance of virtual network function (VNF). The key issue in the deployment of SFCs is proposing effective algorithms to achieve efficient use of resources. In this article, we propose an SFC deployment optimization (SFCDO) algorithm based on a breadth-first search (BFS). The algorithm first uses a BFS-based algorithm to find the shortest path between the source node and the destination node. Then, based on the shortest path, the path with the fewest hops is preferentially chosen to implement the SFC deployment. Finally, we compare the performances with the greedy and simulated annealing (G-SA) algorithm. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm is optimized in terms of end-to-end delay and bandwidth resource consumption. In addition, we also consider the load rate of the nodes to achieve network load balancing.

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Low-Latency and Resource-Efficient Service Function Chaining Orchestration in Network Function Virtualization

Cloud computing has been a cost-efficient paradigm for deploying various applications in datacenters in recent years. Therefore, efficient provisioning for virtual data center (VDC) requests from different service providers (SPs) over physical data centers plays a vital role in improving the quality of service (QoS) and reducing the operational cost of SPs. Therefore, a significant attention has been paid for the VDC provisioning problem. However, few approaches have been proposed for the problem of reliable VDC embedding across multiple data centers, as most of them only consider the problem of VDC mapping within a single data center. In this paper, we study the problem of QoS-aware VDC provisioning across multiple data centers, such that the total bandwidth consumption in the inter-data center backbone network is minimized while satisfying the reliability requirement of each VDC request. We formulate this problem as a mathematical optimization problem by using integer linear programming (ILP) and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm called reliable VDC embedding (RVDCE) algorithm to solve this NP-hard problem. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of blocking ratio, CPU resource consumption, and bandwidth consumption of backbone network than the existing solution. In addition, this paper has also incorporated integrated security to minimize security vulnerabilities seen in other similar approaches. Apart from demonstrating how to resolve security challenges in our VDC proposal, cost calculations have been implemented to demonstrate the robustness, resiliency, validity, and effectiveness of the VDC provisioning solution for cloud computing.

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Toward SLAs Guaranteed Scalable VDC Provisioning in Cloud Data Centers

Network function virtualization (NFV) in 6G can use standard virtualization techniques to enable network functions via software. Resource scheduling is one of the key research areas of NFV in 6G and is mainly used to deploy service function chains (SFCs) in substrate networks. However, determining how to utilize network resources efficiently has always been a difficult problem in SFC deployment. This article focuses on how to efficiently provision online SFC requests in NFV with 6G. We first establish a mathematical model for the problem of online SFC provisioning. Then, we propose an efficient online service function chain deployment (OSFCD) algorithm that selects the path to deploy that is close to the SFC length. Finally, we compare our proposed algorithm with three other existing algorithms by simulation experiments. The experimental results show that the OSFCD algorithm optimizes multiple performance indicators of online SFC deployment.

Dynamic Network Function Provisioning to Enable Network in Box for Industrial Applications

The invention discloses a service function chain deployment method based on breadth-first search The deployment algorithm proposed by the invention does not constrain the scale or the sparse characteristics of the network, and thus can be applied to most networks The algorithm proposed by the invention is based on the shortest path between a service terminal and a user to implement the service function chain deployment, so the bandwidth cost and delay consumed by the deployment are reduced, and the deployment cost is reduced accordingly In the selection of nodes, the node load rate and thelink load rate are considered, an optimal selection factor is designed to reflect the impact of the load rate on the node selection, and the load balancing is optimized

Zhu Xu

Papers

Low-Latency and Resource-Efficient Service Function Chaining Orchestration in Network Function Virtualization

Toward SLAs Guaranteed Scalable VDC Provisioning in Cloud Data Centers

Dynamic Network Function Provisioning to Enable Network in Box for Industrial Applications

Service function chain deployment method based on breadth-first search