Reliability-Aware VNF Provisioning in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Multi-access Edge Computing

In the emerging network architecture of multi-access edge computing (MEC), virtualized network function (VNF) can be deployed to provide network services to users, thus reducing the cost of the service provider. However, the server is not 100% reliable, and its hardware failure can lead to malfunctions of the VNFs deployed on it, which can affect the service reliability for users. In this paper, we focus on reliability-aware VNF service provisioning in MEC to meet the service reliability requirements of users by deploying redundant replicas of VNF instances to different servers. For that, a profit maximization problem for reliability assurance (PMRA) is first formulated and proved to be an NP-hard problem. Then, an efficient local ratio based algorithm (LRBA) is proposed to solve the PMRA problem in a homogeneous MEC scenario. Meanwhile, for the other PMRA problem in the heterogeneous scenario, a fast benefit-cost ratio preference algorithm (BRPA) is proposed. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithms by simulation experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed are promising.