MORSA: A multi-objective resource scheduling algorithm for NFV infrastructure

Abstract

Capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX) have been practical concerns for telecommunication companies, and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has attracted significant attention in recent years. However, the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) includes a wide variety of resource types and stakeholders. Hence, there is still a need for the existing resource scheduling approaches, but they are no longer sufficient. In this paper, we propose a Multi-objective Resource Scheduling Algorithm (MORSA) to optimize the NFVI resources. In the development of the MORSA, we designed a plug-in architecture to satisfy various requirements related to NFVI resources and stakeholder policies. The MORSA allows the NFVI Resource Scheduler to optimize simultaneously the combination of possibly conflicting objectives with multifaceted constraints in complex real world situations. Evaluation results show that the MORSA obtains approximate solutions among conflicting objectives in a reasonable computation time.