Proactive Failure Recovery for Stateful NFV

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology is viewed as a significant component of both the fifth-generation (5G) communication networks and edge computing. In this paper, through reviewing the state-of-the-art work on applying NFV to edge computing, we identify that an urgent research challenge is to provide the proactive failure recovery mechanism for the stateful NFV. To realize such proactive failure recovery, we propose a prediction-based algorithm for redeploying the stateful NFV instances in real-time when network failures occur. The proposed algorithm is based on relax and rounding technique. The theoretical performance guarantee is also analyzed rigorously. Simulation results show that the proposed failure recovery algorithm outperforms the reactive-manner baselines significantly in terms of redeployment latency.