Blaze: Delay-Aware Cloud-Edge Collaborative Service Function Chain Deployment with Network Calculus

With the rapid development of Internet of the Things (IoT) technology, IoT services have higher and higher requirements for latency. In the IoT environment, virtual network functions (VNFs) are deployed on general-purpose hardware and are sequentially connected to form service function chain (SFC) to provide network services for IoT devices. However, the high latency of the link between the cloud center and the edge nodes and the resource capacity limitation of the edge nodes pose challenges to the deployment of SFCs in IoT devices. In this paper, we study the cloud-edge collaborative SFC deployment problem. We applied the network calculus theory to the cloud-edge collaborative SFC deployment for the first time, aiming to provide the end-to-end delay guarantee for the deployed SFC. We model the SFC deployment problem as Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP). Then we propose a heuristic algorithm (Blaze) to solve this problem. Blaze is proven to complete the deployment of SFCs in polynomial time. Finally, the algorithm is evaluated by experimental simulation. The experimental results show that compared with the existing state-of-the-art corresponding algorithms, the proposed algorithm achieves better performance in terms of the number of VNFs deployed in the cloud, resource consumption of edge nodes, and SFC request acceptance rate.