Energy Aware Fuzzy Approach for VNF Placement and Consolidation in Cloud Data Centers

Virtual network function (VNF) is one of the pillars of a Cloud network that separates network functions and their dedicated hardware devices, such as routers, firewalls, and load balancers, to host their services on virtual machines. The VNF is responsible for network services that run on virtual machines and can connect each of them alone or organize themselves into a single enclosure to use all the resources available in that enclosure. This flexibility allows physical and virtual resources to be used in a way that ensures control over power consumption, balance in resource use, and minimizing costs and latency. In order to consolidate VNF groups into a minimum number of virtual machine (VM) with estimation of the association relation to a measure of confidence under the context of possibility theory, we propose a new Fuzzy-FCA approach for VNF placement based on formal concept analysis (FCA) and fuzzy logic in mixed environment based on cloud data centers and Multiple access edge computing (MEC) architecture. Thus, the inclusion of this architecture in the cloud environment ensures the distribution of compute resources to the end user in order to reduce end-to-end latency. To confirm the effectiveness of our solution, we compared it to one of the best algorithms studied in the literature, namely the MultiSwarm algorithm. The results of the series of experiments carried out show the feasibility and efficiency of our algorithm. Indeed, the harvested results confirm the capability of maximizing and balancing the use of resources, of minimizing the latency and the cost of energy consumption. The performance of our solution in terms of average latency represents 16%, a slight increase compared to MultiSwarm, and an average gain, of 49% in run time, compared to the same algorithm.