An IoT-Aware VNF Placement Proof of Concept in a Hybrid Edge-Cloud Smart City Environment

Internet of Things (IoT) along with Virtualized Network Function (VNFs) are creating a wide variety of opportunities for emerging vertical applications. Network operators are faced with a strategic puzzle on how to balance limited resource availability, dynamic IoT traffic requirements, and dynamic IoT device behavior in an end-to-end communication paradigm. To this end, this paper formally defines the IoT-aware VNF Placement (IVP) problem. We then evaluate an indicative set of placement algorithms with different objective functions under static and dynamic traffic scenarios to study their impact on the overall performance. The algorithms are evaluated based on realistic IoT traffic statistics in a smart-city environment and are presented as a simulation-based case study. Evaluation results emphasize the critical impact of considering multi-objective algorithms to accurately capture a set of conflicting goals, while efficiently balancing between them when solving the IVP problem. Finally, we shed light on the importance of using sophisticated lightweight approximation algorithms, to alleviate the inadequacies of the optimal mathematical solution.