IEEE Project Abstract

As two of the key technologies of 5G, Fog-based Radio Access Network (FRAN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have become the important direction for the radio network architecture evolution. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) compose the Service Function Chain (SFC) in a particular order, and mobile network users communicate with each other or service terminals through SFCs. For service providers, it is crucially important for efficient deploying/mapping SFCs into 5G mobile network, since the SFCs deployment problem is a NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose efficient SFCs deployment algorithms for solving this challenge with two main design goals: i) minimizing the cost of link resource, i.e., minimizing the path length of the entire SFC by combining VNFs and mapping temporary links; ii) minimizing the cost of computing resources through using the existing virtual machines as much as possible while performing the same VNF. We model the SFCs deployment problem as an optimization problem by using ILP, as well devise heuristic algorithms to make trade-off between these two conflicting design goals. From simulation results, we can see that the performance of our proposed algorithms is promising in terms of the total SFCs mapping cost, total links mapping cost and blocking ratio.