Machine Learning for Service Migration: A Survey

Future communication networks are envisioned to satisfy increasingly granular and dynamic requirements to accommodate the application and user demands. Indeed, novel immersive and mission-critical services necessitate increased computing and network resources, reduced communication latency, and guaranteed reliability. Thus, efficient and adaptive resource management schemes are required to provide and maintain sufficient levels of Quality of Experience (QoE) during the service life-cycle. Service migration is considered a key enabler of dynamic service orchestration. Indeed, moving services on demand is an efficient mechanism for user mobility support, load balancing in case of fluctuations in service demands, and hardware failure mitigation. However, service migration requires planning, as multiple parameters must be optimized to reduce service disruption to a minimum. Recent breakthroughs in computational capabilities allowed the emergence of Machine Learning as a tool for decision making that is expected to enable seamless automation of network resource management by predicting events and learning optimal decision policies. This paper surveys contributions applying Machine Learning (ML) methods to optimize service migration, providing a detailed literature review on recent advances in the field and establishing a classification of current research efforts with an analysis of their strengths and limitations. Finally, the paper provides insights on the main directions for future research.