Xiaoxi Zhang, Zhiyi Huang, Chuan Wu, Zongpeng Li, F. Lau
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引用次数: 35
Abstract
With the recent advent of network functions virtualization (NFV), enterprises and businesses are looking into network service provisioning through the service chains of virtual network functions (VNFs), instead of relying on dedicated hardware middleboxes. Accompanying this trend, an NFV market is emerging, where NFV service providers create VNF instances, assemble VNF service chains, and sell them for the use of customers, using resources (computing, bandwidth) that they own or rent from other resource suppliers. Efficient service chain provisioning and pricing mechanisms are still missing, to charge assembled service chains according to demand and the supply of resources at any time. We propose an online stochastic auction mechanism for on-demand service chain provisioning and pricing at an NFV provider. Our auction takes in buy bids for service chains from multiple customers and sell bids from various resource suppliers to supplement the NFV provider’s geo-distributed resource pool, with resource occupation/contribution durations. We extend online primal-dual optimization framework for handling both buyers and sellers, with a new competitive analysis. The online mechanism maximizes the expected social welfare of the NFV ecosystem (the NFV provider, customers and resource suppliers) with a good competitive ratio as compared with the expected offline optimal social welfare, while guaranteeing truthfulness in bidding, individual rationality for both buyers and sellers, and polynomial time for computation. We evaluate our mechanism through trace-driven simulation studies, and demonstrate a close-to-offline-optimal performance in expected social welfare under realistic settings.
期刊介绍:
The IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) is a prestigious journal that covers various topics related to Computer Networks and Communications (Q1) as well as Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Q1). Each issue of JSAC is dedicated to a specific technical topic, providing readers with an up-to-date collection of papers in that area. The journal is highly regarded within the research community and serves as a valuable reference.
The topics covered by JSAC issues span the entire field of communications and networking, with recent issue themes including Network Coding for Wireless Communication Networks, Wireless and Pervasive Communications for Healthcare, Network Infrastructure Configuration, Broadband Access Networks: Architectures and Protocols, Body Area Networking: Technology and Applications, Underwater Wireless Communication Networks, Game Theory in Communication Systems, and Exploiting Limited Feedback in Tomorrow’s Communication Networks.