A connectionist approach to dynamic resource management for virtualised network functions

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) continues to gain attention as a paradigm shift in the way telecommunications services are deployed and managed. By separating Network Functions (NFs) from traditional middleboxes, NFV is expected to lead to reduced CAPEX and OPEX, and to more agile services. However, one of the main challenges to achieving these objectives is on how physical resources can be efficiently, autonomously, and dynamically allocated to Virtualised Network Functions (VNFs) whose resource requirements ebb and flow. In this paper, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based algorithm which exploits Virtual Network Function Forwarding Graph (VNF-FG) topology information to predict future resource requirements for each Virtual Network Function Component (VNFC). The topology information of each VNFC is derived from combining its past resource utilisation as well as the modelled effect on the same from VNFCs in its neighbourhood. Our proposal has been evaluated using a deployment of a virtualised IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), and real VoIP traffic traces, with results showing an average prediction accuracy of 90%. Moreover, compared to a scenario where resources are allocated manually and/or statically, our proposal reduces the average number of dropped calls by at least 27% and improves call setup latency by over 29%.