Abstract:
One of the main goals of 5G networks is to support
the technological and business needs of various industries (the
so-called verticals), which wish to offer to their customers a wide
range of services characterized by diverse performance requirements. In this context, a critical challenge lies in mapping in an
automated manner the requirements of verticals into decisions
concerning the network infrastructure, including VNF placement,
resource assignment, and traffic routing. In this paper, we seek
to make such decisions jointly, accounting for their mutual
interaction, efficiently. To this end, we formulate a queuing-based
model and use it at the network orchestrator to optimally match
the vertical’s requirements to the available system resources.
We then propose a fast and efficient solution strategy, called
MaxZ, which allows us to reduce the solution complexity. Our
performance evaluation, carried out an accounting for multiple
scenarios representing the real-world services, shows that MaxZ
performs substantially better than the state-of-the-art alternatives
and consistently close to the optimum.
