Optimal control of VNF deployment and scheduling

Managing network-related resources involves sophisticated trade-off between flexibility, high performance standards, latency demands which adhere to service level agreements (SLAs) and cost constraints. Network functioning virtualization (NFV) opens new challenges to the remote network management which combines activation and control of virtual machines (VMs) according to variable demand. Currently, this functionality is being handled by harnessing the traditional orchestration algorithms using suboptimal heuristics. We model the problem of virtual network function (VNF) allocation by queuing system with flexible number of queues, which captures variety of constraints including queue deployment and displacement, delay cost, holding cost, scheduling reward and fine. Next, we model the system by Markov decision process (MDP) and numerically solve it to find the optimal policy. We show analytically and by simulations that the optimal policy possesses decision thresholds which depend on several parameters ¹ .