Latency and Mobility–Aware Service Function Chain Placement in 5G Networks

5G networks are expected to support numerous novel services and applications with versatile quality of service (QoS) requirements such as high data rates and low end-to-end (E2E) latency. It is widely agreed that E2E latency can be reduced by moving the computational capability closer to the network edge. The limited amount of computational resources of the edge nodes, however, poses the challenge of efficiently utilizing these resources while, at the same time, satisfying QoS requirements. In this work, we employ mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) techniques to formulate and solve a joint user association, service function chain (SFC) placement, where SFCs are composed of virtualized service functions (VSFs), and resource allocation problem in 5G networks composed of decentralized units (DUs), centralized units (CUs), and a core network (5GC). Specifically, we compare four approaches to solving the problem. The first two approaches minimize, respectively, the E2E latency experienced by users and the service provisioning cost. The other two instead aim at minimizing VSF migrations along with their impact on users’ quality of experience with the last one minimizing also the number of inter-CU handovers. We then propose a heuristic to address the scalability issue of the MILP-based solutions. Simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm.