Dynamic Placement of VNF Chains for Proactive Caching in Mobile Edge Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel optimization framework for proactive caching in mobile edge networks using VNF chains, addressing the NP-hard problem with a mathematical model and a scalable heuristic, and evaluates its performance through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It presents a new mathematical programming model and a scale-free heuristic for optimizing VNF caching chains in 5G networks, addressing a complex NP-hard problem.

Findings

The proposed heuristic provides competitive solutions for large network instances.

Numerical results demonstrate significant improvements in network efficiency and user experience.

The framework effectively balances caching costs and service quality in edge networks.

Abstract

Notwithstanding the significant research effort Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architectures received over the last few years little attention has been placed on optimizing proactive caching when considering it as a service chain. Since caching of popular content is envisioned to be one of the key technologies in emerging 5G networks to increase network efficiency and overall end user perceived quality of service we explicitly consider in this paper the interplay and subsequent optimization of caching based VNF service chains. To this end, we detail a novel mathematical programming framework tailored to VNF caching chains and detail also a scale-free heuristic to provide competitive solutions for large network instances since the problem itself can be seen as a variant of the classical NP-hard Uncapacitated Facility Location (UFL) problem. A wide set of numerical investigations are presented for characterizing the attainable system performance of the proposed schemes.