An SMDP-Based Service Function Allocation Scheme for Mobile Edge Clouds

With the increasing global mobile traffic, there is a trend to deploy network services at mobile edge clouds. Benefiting from the techniques of Network Function Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking, service function chains are enabled to compose a series of required network functions dynamically. As a consequence, most of common-used and IT-based mobile network services can be deployed at MEC cloud networks under the 5G context, remarkably reducing user latency and network traffic. However, as resources in cloud networks are limited, it is challenging to promote the system utilization with guaranteed user experience. Thus, in this paper, we formulate the allocation problem of service functions in MECs as an Semi-Markov Decision Process model and present a value iteration algorithm to find the optimized solution, aiming to increase request acceptance rate. Additionally, we discuss the parameter settings of the proposed scheme under different cases to find higher rewards.