Dynamic Service Function Chain Deployment in NFV-enabled Offshore Edge Computing Networks

Network function virtualization (NFV) has gained significant attention as an important paradigm in the network service provisioning. In the NFV environment, network services are provided flexibly by deploying service function chains (SFCs) dynamically, which consist of multiple virtual network functions (VNFs) arranged in predefined order. In this paper, we formulate the dynamic SFC deployment optimization (DSDO) problem in the NFV-enabled offshore edge computing network, by jointly optimizing VNF deployment and routing to maximize the service acceptance rate. An SFC deployment scheme, named betweenness centrality and resource availability based dynamic SFC deployment (BR-DSD) scheme, is proposed to solve the optimization problem. The proposed BR-DSD scheme aims to allocate resources for SFCs by considering both network resources availability and network betweenness centrality. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed BR-DSD scheme outperforms baseline schemes in terms of service acceptance rate.