Joint UPF and Edge Applications Placement and Routing in 5G & Beyond

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of optimally placing and routing applications in 5G networks to maximize operator profit, proposing a heuristic solution that outperforms benchmarks with minimal deviation from optimality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel heuristic algorithm for joint placement and routing of UPF and edge applications, considering internal and external resource allocation in 5G networks.

Findings

The heuristic achieves only ~3% deviation from optimal solutions.

It outperforms benchmark algorithms in placement and routing efficiency.

The approach effectively balances resource utilization and profit maximization.

Abstract

The development of 5G networks has enabled support for a vast number of applications with stringent traffic requirements, both in terms of communication and computation. Furthermore, the proximity of the entities, such as edge servers and User Plane Functions (UPFs) that provide these resources is of paramount importance. However, with the ever-increasing demand from these applications, operators often find their resources insufficient to accommodate all requests. Some of these demands can be forwarded to external entities, not owned by the operator. This introduces a cost, reducing the operator's profit. Hence, to maximize operator's profit, it is important to place the demands optimally in internal or external edge nodes. To this end, we formulate a constrained optimization problem that captures this objective and the inter-play between different parameters, which turns out to be NP-hard. Therefore, we resort to proposing a heuristic algorithm which ranks the demands according to their value to the operator and amount of resources they need. Results show that our approach outperforms the benchmark algorithms, deviating from the optimal solution by only ~3% on average.