Joint UPF and Edge Applications Placement and Routing in 5G & Beyond

The development of 5G networks has enabled support for a vast number of applications with stringent traffic requirements, both in terms of communication and computation. Furthermore, the proximity of the entities, such as edge servers and User Plane Functions (UPFs) that provide these resources is of paramount importance. However, with the ever-increasing demand from these applications, operators often find their resources insufficient to accommodate all requests. Some of these demands can be forwarded to external entities, not owned by the operator. This introduces a cost, reducing the operator's profit. Hence, to maximize operator's profit, it is important to place the demands optimally in internal or external edge nodes. To this end, we formulate a constrained optimization problem that captures this objective and the inter-play between different parameters, which turns out to be NP-hard. Therefore, we resort to proposing a heuristic algorithm which ranks the demands according to their value to the operator and amount of resources they need. Results show that our approach outperforms the benchmark algorithms, deviating from the optimal solution by only ~ 3% on average.