Control of multi-resource infrastructures: Application to NFV and computation offloading

Abstract

Network function virtualization (NFV) and Computation offloading (CO) are state-of-the-art technologies for flexible utilization of networking and processing resources. These two technologies are closely related in that they enable multiple physical entities to process a function provided in a service, and the service (or end host) chooses which resources to use. In this paper, we propose a generalized dual-resource system, which unifies NFV service and CO service frameworks, and formulate a multi-path problem for choosing resources to use in NFV and CO services. The problem is reformulated as a variational inequality by using Lagrange dual theory and saddle point theory. Based on this formulation, we propose an extragradient-based algorithm that controls and splits the sending rate of a service. We prove that the algorithm converges to an optimal point where system cost minus service utility is minimized. Simulations under diverse scenarios demonstrate that our algorithm achieves high quality of service while reducing the system cost by jointly considering dual-resource coupling and service characteristics.