User Mobility-Aware Virtual Network Function Placement for Virtual 5G Network Infrastructure

Cloud offerings represent a promising solution for mobile network operators to cope with the surging mobile traffic. The concept of carrier cloud has therefore emerged as an important topic of inquiry. For a successful carrier cloud, algorithms for optimal placement of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on federated cloud are of crucial importance. In this paper, we introduce different VNF placement algorithms for carrier cloud with two main design goals: i) minimizing path between users and their respective data anchor gateways and ii) optimizing their sessions' mobility. The two design goals effectively represent two conflicting objectives, that we deal with considering the mobility features and service usage behavioral patterns of mobile users, in addition to the mobile operators' cost in terms of the total number of instantiated VNFs to build a Virtual Network Infrastructure (VNI). Different solutions are evaluated based on different metrics and encouraging results are obtained.