Optimal Non-Order NFV Enabled Multicasting in Mobile Edge Clouds

Multicast is a fundamental function in network traffic engineering, allowing data traffic to be delivered from the source node to multiple destinations efficiently. To ensure the reliability and security of data traffic, NFV-enabled multicast (Network Function Virtualization) has emerged as a promising technology to reduce deployment and maintenance costs in mobile edge clouds, and has drawn extensive researching interests recently. However, existing works all assume that the Service Function Chain (SFC) follows a fixed-order, which greatly limits its application. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the first work to address the sequential SFC embedding problem without a fixed order for NFV-enabled multicasting in mobile edge clouds. Firstly, we formulate such a minimum cost SFC embedding problem and prove it to be NP-hard. Secondly, we propose a min-path breadth-first based progressive embedding algorithm (MBPE) for NFV-enabled multicasting, which achieves an approximation ratio of 1+K, where K represents the approximation ratio of the Steiner tree problem. Finally, the experiments demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.