Mobile-Aware Service Function Chain Intelligent Seamless Migration in Multi-access Edge Computing

Abstract

With the improvement of service delay and quality requirements for new applications such as unmanned driving, internet of vehicles, and virtual reality, the deployment of network services is gradually moving from the cloud to the edge. This transition has led to the emergence of multi-access edge computing (MEC) architectures such as distributed micro data center and fog computing. In the MEC environment, network infrastructure is distributed around users, allowing them to access the network nearby and move between different service coverage locations. However, the high mobility of users can significantly affect service orchestration and quality, and even cause service interruption. How to respond to user mobility, dynamically migrate user services, and provide users with a continuous and seamless service experience has become a huge challenge. This paper studies the dynamic migration of service function chain (SFC) caused by user mobility in MEC environments. First, we model the SFC dynamic migration problem in mobile scenarios as an integer programming problem with the goal of optimizing service delay, migration success rate, and migration time. Based on the above model, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-driven SFC adaptive dynamic migration optimization algorithm (DRL-ADMO). DRL-ADMO can perceive the underlying network resources and SFC migration requests, intelligently decide on the migration paths of multiple network functions, and adaptively allocate bandwidth, achieving parallel and seamless SFC migration. Performance evaluation results show that compared with existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm can optimize 7% service delay and 20% migration success rate at the cost of sacrificing a small amount of migration time.