Reveal: Robustness-aware VNF placement and request scheduling in edge clouds

Abstract

In the edge cloud network, service providers place virtual network functions (VNFs) in edge clouds to serve users’ requests. Thus, it is essential to consider VNF placement and request scheduling in edge clouds. Existing works often focus on minimizing request completion time or maximizing network throughput to utilize network resources and ensure users’ QoS efficiently. However, they ignore two practical factors: malicious users and failed VNFs, leading to poor network robustness. To this end, this paper studies robustness-aware VNF placement and request scheduling, named Reveal. Specifically, we limit the number of VNFs each user can access and the number of users each VNF can serve to control the influence scope of malicious users and VNF failures. Since placing VNFs is time-consuming and requests arrive dynamically, we solve this problem through two phases: robust VNF placement and assignment, and online request scheduling. For the first phase, we design an efficient knapsack-based rounding algorithm with bounded approximation factors. For online request scheduling, we propose a primal–dual based algorithm with a competitive ratio of 1−ϵ,O(log1/ϵ) where ϵ∈(0,1). Experiment and simulation results show that Reveal can achieve better performance and robustness than other alternatives.