Joint SFC Deployment and Resource Management in Heterogeneous Edge for Latency Minimization

With the advancement of edge computing and network function virtualization, it is promising to provide flexible and low-latency network services at the network edge. However, due to resource limitation and heterogeneity of servers at the edge, it is unlikely to achieve an efficient service function chain deployment without considering the resource management of edge servers jointly. In this article, we consider the Joint Service function chain Deployment and Resource Management problem (JSDRM) in heterogeneous edge environments with the goal of minimizing the total system latency. We prove the NP-hardness of JSDRM and propose a scheme called JOint service function chain deployment and resource management Scheme (JOS) based on a game-theoretic approach to deploy service function chains and manage resources. We prove that JOS has a constant approximation ratio of 2.62 Extensive simulation results show that our scheme performs comparably to the optimal solution and much better than the baselines. The simulation results also show that the proposed scheme is time-efficient.