A Power Efficient and Robust Virtual Network Functions Placement Problem
28th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 28), Würzburg, Germany, (September 2016)Abstract
Reducing the CAPEX and OPEX is a major concern for Telecom Operators (TOs):
to this extent, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been considered a
key aspect to virtualize network functions and push them to the NFV
Infrastructure. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) can be deployed as a set
of components running on several cooperating Virtual Machines (VMs) inside
modern data centers. As a consequence, it becomes crucial for network
operators to minimize the power consumption of their NFV infrastructure, by
using the minimum set of physical servers and networking equipment subject
to the constraints that VNFs impose on the infrastructure in terms of
compute, memory, disk and network resources requirements. In this work, we
present a joint resources and flow routing assignment problem for VNFs
placement, with the objective of minimizing both the power consumption of
the servers and switches needed to deploy the overall virtualized
infrastructure and routing graph. In contrast to many existing works
assuming perfect knowledge on input parameters, such as traffic demands
between the VNFs, which is difficult to predict, we propose a novel
mathematical model based on the Robust Optimisation (RO) theory to deal
with uncertainty on data. Our numerical evaluation applies focuses on a
specific use-case, that is the deployment of a set of VNFs, typical of a
virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), namely the core for next generation
mobile networks. We demonstrate that with our model, a vEPC operator can
trade-off between two important aspects: the power consumption minimization
on one side, and the protection from severe deviations of the input
parameters, such as traffic demands and compute resources needed by the
individual VNFI components.
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