A Fair VNF Assignment Algorithm for Network Functions Virtualization
Karanbir Singh Ghai, Abdulsalam Yassine, Salimur Choudhury · 2020
On-demand resource management is a challenging prospect, especially in communication networks where the users' requirements of network resources are volatile. This challenge is magnified by the current shift of hardware-dependent network technologies into virtual Network Functions (vNFs) in a cloud-based platform and the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. vNFs are an integral part of edge devices that aims to improve service providers' response time, eliminate redundancy, and end to end latency results in operators' lower operating costs significantly. The efficiency of such a virtualized system largely depends on the optimization of resource allocation between users and Virtual Machines (VM) or hosting devices. One approach to addressed this issue is to minimize the latency of the entire communication network, however, the concern is that this mechanism does not ensure fairness of resource allocation because some of the users may receive enhanced services than others. In the previous study, a Stable Matching Algorithm is proposed to minimize the latency between vNFs and VMs but the algorithm failed to ensure the fairness of the requested services and server elements. In this study, we further extend the previous model to ensure the fairness. Our proposed solution minimizes the maximum latency in the network. This problem is an NP-hard and hence we provide a local search based solution. The experimental result shows improved fairness from other approaches and the fairness index is close to the optimal, which in fact represents the elimination of imbalances to a great extent.