A Multiple Objective Resource Scheduling Algorithm for Network Services on the NFV Infrastructure

Abstract

Capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX) a key practical concerns for telecommunication companies, emphasizing the attraction of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in recent years. However, the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) includes a wide variety of resource types and stakeholders. While many attempts have been made to enhance the ability of existing resource scheduling approaches to support the complex and conflicting NFV ecosystem, they are no longer sufficient. In this paper, I propose the Multiple Objective Resource Scheduling Algorithm (MORSA) to optimize the NFVI resource usage. In developing MORSA, I designed a plug-in architecture to satisfy various requirements related to NFVI resources and stakeholder policies. MORSA allows the NFVI Resource Scheduler to optimize, simultaneously, any combination of possibly conflicting objectives with multifaceted constraints in complex real world situations. Evaluation results show that MORSA obtains good approximate solutions by resolving conflicting objectives in reasonable computation times.