Using Reinforcement Learning to Allocate and Manage SFC in Cellular Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the use of reinforcement learning to deploy a service function chain (SFC) of cellular network service and manage the VNFs operation. We consider that the SFC is deployed by the reinforcement learning agent considering a scenario with distributed data centers, where the virtual network functions (VNFs) are deployed in virtual machines in commodity servers. The VNF management is related to create, delete, and restart the VNFs. The main purpose is to reduce the number of lost packets taking into account the energy consumption of the servers. We use the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO2) algorithm to implement the agent and preliminary results show that the agent is able to allocate the SFC and manage the VNFs, reducing the number of lost packets.