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Virtual Network Function Deployment Strategy in Clustered Multi-Mobile Edge Clouds

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have been widely acknowledged as the fundamental architectural technologies for 5G and beyond networks by consolidating network functions into general-purpose hardware. Meanwhile, emerging Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology provides a promising solution to fulfill service requirements on high reliability and low latency, by extending cloud computing to the edge of networks. To provision a specific type of service, a virtualized network topology, such as Service Function Chain or Service Function Graph is constructed by logically connecting a set of virtual network functions (VNFs). In SDN/NFV-based mobile networks with the MEC cluster, it is imperative to develop an effective VNF deployment strategy to support various services with diverse Quality of Service requirements. In this paper, we propose a VNF deployment strategy for clustered MEC, including VNF placement and routing schemes, with the aim to minimize the average delay of service flows. We first formulate the problem as a two-dimensional knapsack problem, which is NP-Hard. To provide an efficient solution, we develop an improved genetic simulated annealing algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed strategy can significantly reduce the end-to-end service delay in comparison with the state-of-the-art solutions.