Resources Allocation at the Physical Layer for Network Function Virtualization Deployment

Abstract

Resource Allocation (RA) is one of the important factors in network function virtualization (NFV) deployment. As physical (PHY) layer resources are limited, e.g., transmitted energy and channel uses, the RA problem at the PHY layer for NFV deployment has become a fast-growing problem, especially for supporting ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC). Moreover, different nodes in NFV have different requirements for end-to-end communication, e.g., a controller has more stringent reliability requirements than does a logical node. There is a need for efficient and robust RA algorithms at the PHY layer for NFV deployment. To illustrate these challenges, we consider an up-link (UL) transmission protocol for NFV deployment, in which wireless transmissions with short packets are considered, and both the packet length and the transmission power are adjustable. Then, for three NFV deployment scenarios, we formulate three RA problems as three optimization problems to obtain the optimal parameters. Since these optimization problems are highly non-convex and they include excessive constraint conditions, the global optimal solutions are hard to obtain and are even infeasible for the conventional heuristic algorithms due to their low convergence efficiency. To address these problems, in this paper, the intelligent scheme of the modified shuffled frog-leaping algorithm (MSFLA) based on improved extremal optimization (EO) is applied to design RA algorithms. Three RA algorithms are designed for three NFV deployment scenarios to evaluate the quality of the solutions produced by the MSFLA-EO scheme. We perform simulations of three proposed RA algorithms in terms of various performance parameters. The experimental results are encouraging and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed RA algorithms.