Coping With Emerging Mobile Social Media Applications Through Dynamic Service Function Chaining

User generated content (UGC)-based applications are gaining lots of popularity among the community of mobile internet users. They are populating video platforms and are shared through different online social services, giving rise to the so-called mobile social media applications. These applications are characterized by communication sessions that frequently and dynamically update content, shared with a potential number of mobile users, sharing the same location or being dispersed over a wide geographical area. Since most of UGC content of mobile social media applications are exchanged through mobile devices, it is expected that along with online social applications, these content will cause severe congestion to mobile networks, impacting both their core and radio access networks. In this paper, we address the challenges introduced by these applications devising a complete framework that 1) identifies such applications/sessions and 2) initiates multicast-based delivery (or offload through WiFi) of the relevant content. The proposed framework leverages the network function virtualization (NFV) paradigm to dynamically integrate its functionalities to the operators' service function chaining (SFC) process, allowing fast deployment and lowering both capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX) of the mobile operators. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated through mathematical analysis and computer simulations, taking Twitter-like social applications as an example.