SDN-based Service Discovery and Assignment Framework to Preserve Service Availability in Telco-based Multi-Access Edge Computing

The ever-growing number of connected User Equipment (UE), e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), has driven the evolution of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Fifth-Generation (5G) Networks to push the computing resources closer to the UE. Towards that end, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are promising solutions to facilitate the deployment of the required user’s service instances within an approximately one-hop communication range. However, discovering and assigning such service instances to the UE to maintain a high service availability is still an open challenge in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards due to the UE mobility and Telco network heterogeneity. This paper proposes an SDN-based dynamic service discovery and assignment framework for a distributed MEC infrastructure. The proposed framework considers various decision parameters such as UE’s location, the service instance’s demand (i.e., resource utilization), the network link status, and the service instance performance requirements (i.e., service profile) to offer a generic solution for discovering and assigning the service instances to the UE. The framework implementation results show an enhancement of the packet delivery ratio and a lower users’ perceived latency.