Joint VNF Placement and CPU Allocation in 5G

Thanks to network slicing, 5G networks will support a variety of services in a flexible and swift manner. In this context, we seek to make high-quality, joint optimal decisions concerning the placement of VNFs across the physical hosts for realizing the services, and the allocation of CPU resources in VNFs sharing a host. To this end, we present a queuing-based system model, accounting for all the entities involved in 5G networks. Then, we propose a fast and efficient solution strategy yielding near-optimal decisions. We evaluate our approach in multiple scenarios that well represent real-world services, and find it to consistently outperform state-of-the-art alternatives and closely match the optimum.