Recent Advances of Resource Allocation in Network Function Virtualization

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 32; no. 2; p. 1
• Main Authors: Yang, Song, Li, Fan, Trajanovski, Stojan, Yahyapour, Ramin, Fu, Xiaoming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Delays; Hardware; Mathematical models; Network function virtualization; Parameters; Placement; Provisioning; QoS; Quality of service; Resource Allocation; Resource management; Routing; Service Function Chaining; Virtual environments; Virtual networks; Virtualization
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2020.3017001

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been emerging as an appealing solution that transforms complex network functions from dedicated hardware implementations to software instances running in a virtualized environment. In this survey, we provide an overview of recent advances of resource allocation in NFV. We generalize and analyze four representative resource allocation problems, namely, (1) the VNF Placement and Traffic Routing problem, (2) VNF Placement problem, (3) Traffic Routing problem in NFV, and (4) the VNF Redeployment and Consolidation problem. After that, we study the delay calculation models and VNF protection (availability) models in NFV resource allocation, which are two important Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Subsequently, we classify and summarize the representative work for solving the VPTR problem and the VRC problem by considering various QoS parameters (e.g., cost, delay, reliability and energy) and different scenarios (e.g., edge cloud, online provisioning and distributed provisioning). Finally, we conclude our survey with a short discussion on the state-of-the-art of literatures and emerging topics in the related field, and highlight areas where we expect high potential for future research.