On Demonstrating the Gain of SFC Placement with VNF Sharing at the Edge

The demand for edge resources is increasing and will continue to rise especially because of delay- sensitive applications. Because of the limited resources at the network edge, efficient resource utilization will play a crucial role. In this paper, we demonstrate the gain of VNFs sharing- based service function chaining (SFC) requests placement, as a way of satisfying more requests with average less resources per request. We formulated the sharing-based SFC placement as an integer linear program (ILP) to minimize the overall deployment cost, hence optimize resource utilization and yet satisfy the QoS requirements. Our experiments show that sharing deployed underutilized VNFs will help satisfy 9-47% more SFC requests with on average 14-46% less resources per request.