Joint User Association and VNF Placement for Latency Sensitive Applications in 5G Networks

With the advent of 5G systems, telecommunication service providers (TSPs) have been facing a tremendous transition by the raised expectations of supporting billions of IoT devices and an unprecedented amount of generated data. This revolutionary transformation necessitates innovative approaches such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) to meet the requirements of many novel applications in terms of their high data rate and low latency. The idea behind MEC is to move data, virtualization, and processing capabilities from central data centers to the edge of the network. However, resources at the network edge are very scarce and costly to provision. Therefore, TSPs have to make smart decisions on how to utilize the network resources such as to make sure that the user service requirements (e.g., data rate, latency) are satisfied while the network resources are used most efficiently. In this paper, we study the problem of joint user association, VNF placement, and resource allocation, employing mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) technique. The objectives of the formulations are to minimize (i) the service provisioning cost, (ii) the number of VNF instances, and (iii) the transport network utilization, having an overarching goal of drawing a comparison between these different approaches.