Revenue Maximizing Online Service Function Chain Deployment in Multi-Tier Computing Network

Abstract

Multi-tier computing (MC) is a promising architecture that integrates cloud computing, fog computing, and edge computing to provide users with a consistent experience of computing services by fusing computing devices within the network through virtualization technology. Although MC combines powerful computation and communication resources, the massive demand from Service Function Chain (SFC) deployments continues to make it challenging regarding resource constraints, latency satisfaction, and revenue-cost tradeoffs. To this end, in this article, we study an SFC deployment problem in MC and formulate a problem for maximizing the revenue of online SFC deployment under latency, computation resources, and communication resources constraints. To solve this online problem better, we construct a computation and communication resource cost model and transform the original online problem into a deployment cost minimization problem and a request admission problem by an alternating optimization approach. To solve the two subproblems, we propose an online approximation algorithm with a provable competitive ratio for the particular scenario with no latency requirements. Then, based on the cost model, we propose an online heuristic algorithm that adopts a binary search method for the original problem with latency requirements. Simulation experiments show that our two proposed online algorithms have advantages in total revenue, running time, and load balancing compared with other comparison algorithms.