Group Sparse Space Information Network With Joint Virtual Network Function Deployment and Maximum Flow Routing Strategy

For the space information network (SIN) with network function virtualization (NFV), a large number of active nodes deployed with virtual network functions (VNFs) impose heavy coordination overhead. In this paper, we investigate the trade-off between the network maximum flow and coordination overhead under the service function chain (SFC) constraints. Specifically, we propose the group sparse joint VNFs deployment and flow routing strategy (GS-VNF-R) to strike the trade-off between the network maximum flow and coordination overhead. Although the GS-VNF-R scheme can be formulated as a convex problem, for a large-scale SIN, solving the GS-VNF-R problem by traditional convex optimizations imposes a heavy computation burden. In order to reduce the time complexity, we propose a novel optimal low-complexity block-successive upper-bound minimization method of multipliers based group sparse (BSUM-M-GS) algorithm, which can converge to the global optimal with much less complexity. Simulation results show that for some scenarios, 60% of active nodes can be saved by using the proposed GS-VNF-R scheme without any performance loss compared to the full cooperation scheme, which results in significant cooperation overhead reduction. Moreover, simulation results demonstrate that our proposed BSUM-M-GS algorithm can significantly reduce the complexity to the extent of 7 orders of magnitude for some scenarios.