Performance Analysis of SDN and NFV enabled Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is regarded as a promising method to increase the data storage and enhance the processing power of mobile devices. Technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) will be deployed in MCC to simplify the network management and accelerate mobile service deployment. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of future MCC, we developed a comprehensive analytical model to investigate the performance of MCC in the presence of both NFV service chains and SDN networks. The model is capable of capturing the interactions between SDN and NFV when they share the same underlying physical infrastructure. The end-to-end latency is derived for different scales of service deployments and network configurations. Comprehensive simulation experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate that the proposed analytical model corresponds well with the simulation experiments. In addition, we show how the analytical model can be a useful tool to investigate the impact of centralised SDN control on the performance of NFV traffic transmission.