Optimized IoT Service Chain Implementation in Edge Cloud Platform: A Deep Learning Framework

Internet of Things (IoT) services have been implemented for several network applications from smart cities to rural areas. However, there are many barriers to provide an efficient solution for the IoT service deployment underlying innovation SDN/NFV-based technologies. First, though an IoT service can flexibly deploy via virtual network functions (VNFs), a deployment scheme needs to solve the joint routing and resource allocation problem, which becomes more difficult than the traditional centralized cloud/datacenter solution due to distributed resources in the edge-cloud network. In addition, due to uncertain workloads in IoT services, static optimization solutions may not deal with uncompleted knowledge of the entire input, which is often given by assumptions, but unrealistic in current provisioning approaches. Aiming to address these issues, we model an online mechanism for the dynamic IoT service chain deployment to optimize the operational cost in a finite horizon. We propose a JOint Routing and Placement problem for IoT service chain (JORP) that can dynamically scale in/out the number of VNF instances. We then propose a learning method to efficiently solve JORP based on branch-and-bound (BnB). Our proposed learning mechanism can intelligently imitate the branching/pruning actions of BnB, and remove unlikely solutions in the search space based on the deep neural network model to improve the performance. In that respect, we take an intensive simulation that illustrates the promising result of our proposed deep learning method compared to BnB and the greedy baseline in terms of the performance of the algorithm and the operational cost reduction.