Latency Aware Optimal VNF Deployment on Edge Devices for IoT Services
Vijay Adoni, Leila Karimi, Peash Ranjan Saha, Salimur Choudhury, Daya Ram Gaur · 2024
Hosting virtual network function (VNF) on the edge devices in modern IoT networks significantly reduces the number of appliance hardware needed. It also expedites significant routing and load-balancing processes and reduces power consumption and maintenance costs for an extensive network. Therefore, placing VNFs on edge devices with efficient resource utilization to serve the growing number of IoT devices is an important research question for the network community. This research proposes a many-to-many VNF placement model with fairness built in. One user (IoT device) can access multiple VNFs, and many VNFs can be hosted into a single host (edge device). We give an optimization model and valid inequalities for the optimal placement of VNFs to minimize the total latency. A branch and cut algorithm is also developed here for solving the model optimally. We evaluate the model with synthetic data for a many-to-many and one-to-one mapping of VNFs and hosts. A detailed simulation shows that the proposed algorithm(s) can produce an optimal and fair placement in near real-time on realistically sized instances.