Latency-aware Virtualized Network Function provisioning for distributed edge clouds

Abstract

The emergence of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enabled decoupling network functionality from dedicated hardware and placing them upon generic computing resources. Moreover, the introduction of edge computing paradigm which utilized the resources at the network edges brings reduced end-to-end latency. With these technologies, Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) can be placed in anywhere either in the central clouds to utilize more resources or in the network edges to reduce the end-to-end latency. In this work, we propose a dynamic resource provisioning algorithm for VNFs to utilize both edge and cloud resources. Adapting to dynamically changing network volumes, the algorithm automat..