Improving Resource Utilization with Virtual Media Function Decomposition

For many years, media transport and processing in professional media environments have been accomplished using specialized hardware. The flexibility of IP networking and Media Function Virtualization (MFV) can enable broadcasters to build cost-efficient architectures for the deployment of media services. These architectures can be further exploited to perform decomposition of Virtual Media Functions (VMFs) resulting in improved utilization of the MFV Infrastructure (MFVi) resources. To this end, this paper presents an algorithm aimed at optimizing the VMF Forwarding Graphs (VMF-FGs) media services. A first-fit based heuristic is also proposed for deploying media services on a given MFVi. The evaluation results indicate that VMF-FG decomposition can significantly improve the request acceptance ratio and reduce resource requirements.