Resource-Ability Assisted Service Function Chain Embedding and Scheduling for 6G Networks With Virtualization

Abstract

While 5G is being deployed all around the world, the industry and academia start the investigation of 6G. Network function virtualization (NFV) is seen as the key enabler towards the flexible resource management and sharing of 6G networks. The main idea of NFV is to decouple the physical devices from the specific functions that run on them. In NFV, virtual network service (NS) is modeled as a service function chain (SFC). The challenges in SFC description, composition, embedding, and scheduling are key issues in NFV. In this paper, we focus on the joint SFC embedding and scheduling for NFV in 6G networks. With the assistance of sensing the physical node resource abilities, we propose a novel SFC embedding and scheduling algorithm, which is named as RA-SFC-6G . A new service is first composed as an SFC which is an ordered sequence of virtual network functions (VNFs). Afterwards, our RA-SFC-6G algorithm will select the physical nodes with stronger resource abilities and abundant resources to accommodate the SFC. In addition, the NS is guaranteed to be implemented without violating the NS maximum allowed scheduling time. If violated, our RA-SFC-6G can re-embed and re-schedule the violated VNFs to suitable positions. In order to validate our RA-SFC-6G performance, we do the experiment work. Experiment results show that our RA-SFC-6G achieves at least 10 $\%$ higher SFC acceptance ratio than the previous counterparts and the typical heuristics.