Abstract
Future mobile networks supporting Internet of Things are expected to provide both high throughput and low latency to user-specific services. One way to overcome this challenge is to adopt Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Besides latency constraints, these services may have strict function chaining requirements. The distribution of network functions over different hosts and more flexible routing caused by service function chaining raise new challenges for end-to-end performance analysis. In this paper, as a first step, we analyze an end-to-end communication system that consists of both MEC servers and a server at the core network hosting different types of virtual network functions. We develop a queueing model for the performance analysis of the system consisting of both processing and transmission flows. We propose a method in order to derive analytical expressions of the performance metrics of interest, i.e., end-to-end delay, system throughput, task drop rate. Then, we show how to apply the similar method to a larger system and derive a stochastic model for such systems. We observe that the simulation and analytical results are very close. By evaluating the system under different scenarios, we provide insights for the decision making on traffic flow control and its impact on critical performance metrics.
Highlights
T HE INCREASING demand of different kinds of network services and the requirements of 5G networks for low capital expenditure raise the need for the improvement of today’s networks in terms of both flexibility and scalability
We develop a methodology by applying tools from queueing theory in order to derive approximate analytical expressions of the performance metrics of interest such as end-to-end delay, drop rate, and throughput
SUMMARY Inspired by the promising network flexibility and scalability provided by Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and the decreasing of latency by offloading tasks in the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) servers, in this paper we model an end-to-end communication system that consists of both technologies
Summary
T HE INCREASING demand of different kinds of network services and the requirements of 5G networks for low capital expenditure raise the need for the improvement of today’s networks in terms of both flexibility and scalability. There are works that consider the modeling of connected VNF as a sequence of queues where the goal is to guarantee the stability of the system and some particular network or service requirements. To the best of our knowledge, there are no works providing end-to-end network performance analysis for a network with MEC deployed and operated within the NFV environment. We model and analyze a simple end-to-end communication system which consists of two MEC servers at the edge network and one at the core network hosting different types of VNFs. We develop a methodology by applying tools from queueing theory in order to derive approximate analytical expressions of the performance metrics of interest such as end-to-end delay, drop rate, and throughput. In this work we provide approximate analytical expressions for the performance metrics of our interest in order to provide insights of how to design a system to satisfy particular network requirements
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