Energy-efficient and Traffic-aware VNF Placement for Vertical Services in 5G Networks
Yi Yue, Wencong Yang, Xiao Min Liang, Xihuizi Meng, Rong Huang, Xiongyang Tang · 2022
Enabled by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networks (SDN), 5G networks benefit various industries (the so-called verticals) by supporting their technological and business needs flexibly and swiftly. However, a critical challenge is making high-quality joint optimal decisions for vertical demand mapping, involving Virtual Network Function (VNF) placement and optimization of network resources. In particular, to devise VNF placement schemes, network operators need to consider different objectives, such as minimizing operational costs or network latency, which are optimization objectives traditionally addressed separately. This paper studies the VNF placement for service function chains to minimize energy and traffic costs jointly. First, the problem is formulated as an optimization problem. Then we propose a joint optimization function to measure the energy consumption of physical nodes and traffic cost on links. Then, we improve the biogeography-based evolutionary algorithm to solve the proposed problem. Simulation results show that our method is effective for the proposed problem and outperforms existing methods in terms of performance.