Software Defined Networking II: NFV

Network function virtualization (NFV) emerges as a promising technology to increase the network flexibility, customizability, and efficiency by softwarizing traditional dedicated hardware based functions to virtualized network functions. The prosperous potential of edge cloud makes it an ideal platform to host the network functions. From the perspective of network service providers, an inevitable concern is how to reduce the overall cost for renting various resources from infrastructure providers. This first relates to the virtualized network function (VNF) placement, which shall not be discussed independently without the consideration of flow scheduling. In this chapter, we first discuss a static VNF placement problem with preknown service request rate. Then, we consider a more practical scenario and we alternatively investigate how to dynamically minimize the overall operational cost with joint consideration of packet scheduling, network function management, and resource allocation, without any prior knowledge.