Minimizing Delay in Network Function Visualization with Quantum Computing

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a crucial technology for the 5G network development because it can improve the flexibility of employing hardware and reduce the construction of base stations. There are vast service chains in NFV to meet users’ requests, which are composed of a sequence of network functions. These virtual network functions (VNFs) are implemented in virtual machines by software and virtual environment. How to deploy VMs to process VNFs of the service chains as soon as possible when users’ requests are received is very challenging to solve by traditional algorithms on a large scale. Compared with traditional algorithms, quantum computing has better computational performance because of quantum parallelism. We build an integer linear programming model of the VNF scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing delays, and transfer it into the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) model. Our proposed heuristic algorithm employs a quantum annealer to solve the model. Finally, we evaluate the computational results and explore the feasibility of leveraging quantum computing to solve the VNF scheduling problem.