A hybrid model for VNF deployment capable of responding to online requests at network edge

Abstract

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a new network architecture that replaces dedicated hardware appliances with software instances and run them via software virtualization on general-purpose servers at edge clouds. As edge clouds are resource-constrained, optimal placement of virtual network functions (VNFs) is a challenging task. This problem has proven to be NP-hard, and thus, metaheuristic algorithms have been widely used to solve it. However, these techniques suffer from high computational complexity due to their iterative, time-consuming process and cannot be performed in real-time for online requests. This paper proposes a hybrid model based on heuristic algorithms and the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) to optimally assign VNFs to physical servers at edge clouds. In this method, a multi-criteria heuristic model is used for online VNF deployment, while WOA is performed offline to tune the hyperparameters of the heuristic model. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method against existing techniques in terms of power consumption and acceptance rate.