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Virtual Network Function Placement: Towards Minimizing Network Latency and Lead Time

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging network architecture to increase flexibility and agility within operator's networks by placing virtualized services on demand in Cloud data centers (CDCs). One of the main challenges for the NFV environment is how to efficiently allocate Virtual Network Functions (VNF) to Virtual Machines (VMs). Although a significant amount of work/research has been already conducted for the generic VNF placement problem, network latency among various network components has not been comprehensively considered yet. To address this concern, in this article, we design a more comprehensive model based on real measurements to capture network latency among VNFs with more granularity to optimize placement of VNFs in CDCs. Experimental results are promising and indicate that our approach, namely VNF Low-Latency Placement (VNF-LLP), can reduce network latency by up to 64.24% (50.33% in average) compared with two generic algorithms. Furthermore, it has a lower lead time (time to find a suitable VM to host a VNF) as compared with two classic approaches.