Leveraging Micro-Services for Ultra-Low Latency: An Optimization Model for Service Function Chains Placement

The evolution of the Internet tends toward ever requiring lower latency services. Cloud robotics or drone piloting are service use-cases in which the latency of traffic cannot exceed a few milliseconds. Reducing the latency can be achieved through several means, and micro-services deployed over virtual infrastructures appears as a promising way by enabling service chain reductions, micro-function mutualization and parallelism. However, the placement and routing of such components appears as an harder task to achieve as compared to monolithic approaches of the state of the art. Consequently, we propose in this paper a comprehensive optimization model in charge of placing micro-services in a virtualized network infrastructure, under ultra-low latency constraints while preserving resource consumption. By challenging our model with several realistic scenarios in terms of topology and service function chains (SFC), we demonstrate to what extent it improves the overall performance of SFC by especially minimizing the gap between the expected latency and the actual one, as compared to several competitors, thus making it a well-fitted approach for ultra-low latency services.