Cost-efficient VNF Placement Strategy for IoT Networks with Availability Assurance

Cloud computing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have been leveraged in building Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks because of their ability to reduce cost and to provide elastic and resilient services to rapid-growing IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a novel model to track the impact from placement strategy changes to the cost and the availability of deploying VMs of a Virtual Network Functions (VNF). With our model, the unit resource cost increases as there is less resource left on a host. Putting VMs on the same host takes up more resources of the host but saves network bandwidth cost because of co-location. When enforcing anti-affinity for placing VMs on different hosts, experimental results show increases of both availability and inter-host network bandwidth cost, but varying trends of total costs considering other resources.