Joint Server Activation and Network Slice Deployment in Mobile Edge Computing Networks

Network slicing provides personalized services by building isolated logical networks. Besides, through deploying Virtual Network Function (VNF) chains on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers, network slicing can guarantees the performance of low-latency services. To reduce maintenance costs, it is necessary to optimize the deployment of both the slices’ access functions on the base stations and the VNF chains on the MEC servers. Meanwhile, optimizing MEC server activation can save energy while meeting service demands. There have been many studies focusing on MEC server activation, access function deployment, and VNF chain deployment, but no work has considered them simultaneously. To fill this research gap, we construct a joint server activation as well as the access functions and VNF chains deployment model, aiming to guarantee performance while minimizing the cost. This problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem which is hard to be solved. Thus, we decompose the problem and design a Deep Q Network (DQN)based three-stage algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme over the baseline methods.