DRL-Based VNF Cooperative Scheduling Framework With Priority-Weighted Delay

Effective Service Function Chains (SFCs) mapping and Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) scheduling are crucial to ensure high-quality service provision for Internet of Things (IoT) tasks. Meeting the varying demands of multiple SFCs poses a significant challenge, particularly when working with the limited resources available in edge computing networks. Most existing working focuses on uniformly mapping and scheduling service requests in a batch processing manner within a given time period, without taking the diversity and priority of VNFs into account. When there is a sudden surge in demand, the issues of VNF queueing waiting and resources imbalance become prominent. To address the mentioned issues, this paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based VNF cooperative scheduling framework with priority-weighted delay. In light of the urgency of VNFs with higher priorities and the limitations of available resources, we begin by modeling an average queuing delay with priority weight based on the shortest remaining time priority technique. We then formulate a mathematical optimization problem to minimize the modeled delay in VNF scheduling process while providing suitable multidimensional resources in the edge network. Finally, a DRL method with experience replay and target Q-network is designed to effectively obtain the optimal solutions of the optimization problem from experience. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms its peers in terms of SFC request acceptance, delay, load balance, and resource utilization.