Online Virtual Network Function Scheduling Towards Deterministic Latency

Network function virtualization aims to deploy virtual network functions (VNFs) on commercial off-the-shelf hardware, allowing for efficient implementation of network services by scheduling various VNFs. However, the requirements of deterministic networking poses higher demands on VNF scheduling to achieve guaranteed latency performance. In this paper, we study the online VNF scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the system cost regarding to unfinished services while improving the determinism of latency. The formulated optimization task yields a mixed integer program problem and we propose an online VNF scheduling algorithm to tackle it, which transforms the end-to-end latency constraint into deadlines for each VNF and adopts an online primal-dual method to generate scheduling decisions. Numerical results show that the proposed scheduling algorithm outperforms two traditional rule-based scheduling methods in terms of latency and acceptance ratio.