Mobility-Aware Service Function Chaining in 5G Wireless Networks with Mobile Edge Computing

The incorporation of Virtual Network Function (VNF)/Service Function Chaining (SFC) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) allows 5G networks to deliver a variety of services and applications in a more flexible manner. However, without inter-MEC handoffs for the VNFs of the corresponding SFC, user mobility may affect user satisfaction of the service due to unacceptably long service delay. To tackle this problem, one has to determine, upon a handoff, which VNFs of the SFC to be migrated, to which MEC server(s), and with how much resource of each MEC server to be allocated to the user so that the service delay constraint of the SFC will not be violated. This problem is referred to as the mobile SFC embedding problem, which is NP-Hard, and is formulated via integer programming to minimize service interruption for mobile users. We then propose an on-line algorithm called Follow-Me Chain, which includes two key components: SFC placement and SFC migration, to solve this problem. The simulation results show that the proposed Follow-Me Chain outperforms existing solutions in terms of user satisfaction under the same number of users accommodated in the system, demonstrating that FMC is indeed an efficient and effective solution for mobile SFC embedding problem in 5G networks with MEC.