CPVNF:Cost-efficient Proactive VNF Placement and Chaining for Value-Added Services in Content Delivery Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces CPVNF, a proactive algorithm for cost-efficient placement and chaining of Virtual Network Functions in Content Delivery Networks, optimizing costs while ensuring quality of service in large-scale environments.

Contribution

It formulates the VNF placement problem as an ILP and proposes a scalable proactive algorithm for cost minimization in CDN environments.

Findings

The algorithm effectively minimizes costs while meeting QoS requirements.

It scales well to large CDN networks with many servers and users.

Simulation results demonstrate its efficiency across different network sizes.

Abstract

Value-added services (e.g., overlaid video advertisements) have become an integral part of today's Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). To offer cost-efficient, scalable and more agile provisioning of new value-added services in CDNs, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigm may be leveraged to allow implementation of fine-grained services as a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to be placed in CDN. The manner in which these chains are placed is critical as it both affects the quality of service (QoS) and provider cost. The problem is however, very challenging due to the specifics of the chains (e.g.,one of their end-points is not known prior to the placement). We formulate it as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) and propose a cost efficient Proactive VNF placement and chaining (CPVNF)algorithm. The objective is to find the optimal number of VNFs along with their locations in such a manner that the cost is minimized while QoS is met. Apart from cost minimization, the support for large-scale CDNs with a large number of servers and end-users is an important feature of the proposed algorithm. Through simulations, the algorithm's behaviour for small-scale to large-scale CDN networks is analyzed.