Middleboxes have become a vital part of modern networks by providing service functions such as content filtering, load balancing and optimization of network traffic. An ordered sequence of middleboxes composing a logical service is called service chain. Service Function Chaining (SFC) enables us to define these service chains. Recent optimization models of SFCs assume that the functionality of a middlebox is provided by a single software appliance, commonly known as Virtual Network Function (VNF). This assumption limits SFCs to the throughput of an individual VNF and resources of a physical machine hosting the VNF instance. Moreover, typical service providers offer VNFs with heterogeneous throughput and resource configurations. Thus, deploying a service chain with custom throughput can become a tedious process of stitching heterogeneous VNF instances. In this paper, we describe how we can overcome these limitations without worrying about underlying VNF configurations and resource constraints. This prospect is achieved by distributed deploying multiple VNF instances providing the functionality of a middlebox and modeling the optimal deployment of a service chain as a mixed integer programming problem. The proposed model optimizes host and bandwidth resources allocation, and determines the optimal placement of VNF instances, while balancing workload and routing traffic among these VNF instances. We show that this problem is NP-Hard and propose a heuristic solution called Kariz. Kariz utilizes a tuning parameter to control the trade-off between speed and accuracy of the solution. Finally, our solution is evaluated using simulations in data-center networks.
While services benefit from distributed cloud centers running in isolation, allowing multiple centers to cooperate on implementing services unlocks the full power of distributed cloud computing. Distributed cloud services are typically set up by chaining together a number of functions that are specified with an implicit order. They can incorporate complex structures, e.g., include functions that classify and forward flows over distinct branches and functions that are traversed by certain types of flows but skipped by others. These requirements need specification techniques more powerful than e…
Service Function Chaining (SFC) is a crucial technology for future Internet. It aims to overcome the limitation of current deployment models which is rigid and static. Application of this technology relies on algorithms that can optimally mapping SFC to substrate network. This category of algorithms is referred as "Service Function Chaining Resource Allocation (SFC-RA)" algorithms or "VNF placement (VNFP)" algorithms. This paper presents a survey of current researches in SFC-RA algorithms. After presenting the formulation and related problems, several variants of SFC-RA problem are summarized.…
Service Function Chaining (SFC) is a trending paradigm, which has helped to introduce unseen flexibility in telecom networks. Network service providers, as well as big network infrastructure providers, are competing to offer personalized services for their customers. Hence, added value services require the invocation of various elementary functions called Service Functions (SFs). The SFC concept composes and imposes the order in which SFs are invoked for a particular service. Emerging technologies such as Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization support the dynamic creat…
Currently, we have witnessed a myriad of solutions that benefit from programmable hardware. The 5G Core (5GC) can and should also benefit from such paradigm to offload certain functions to the dataplane. In this work, we designed and implemented a P4-based solution for traffic identification and chaining using the Netronome Agilo SmartNIC. The solution here presented is deployed in-between the RAN and UPF (User Plane Function) so that traffic coming from the RAN is identified and chained using SRv6 based on different rules defined by the control plane. The traffic identification and the constr…
Network functions (e.g., firewalls, load balancers, etc.) have been traditionally provided through proprietary hardware appliances. Often, hardware appliances need to be hardwired back to back to form a service chain providing chained network functions. Hardware appliances cannot be provisioned on demand since they are statically embedded in the network topology, making creation, insertion, modification, upgrade, and removal of service chains complex, and also slowing down service innovation. Hence, network operators are starting to deploy Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), which are virtualize…
Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization are two paradigms that offer flexible software-based network management. Service providers are instantiating Virtualized Network Functions - e.g., firewalls, DPIs, gateways - to highly facilitate the deployment and reconfiguration of network services with reduced time-to-value. They employ Service Function Chaining technologies to dynamically reconfigure network paths traversing physical and virtual network functions. Providing a cost-efficient virtual function deployment over the network for a set of service chains is a key techn…
Future mobile networks supporting Internet of Things are expected to provide both high throughput and low latency to user-specific services. One way to overcome this challenge is to adopt Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Besides latency constraints, these services may have strict function chaining requirements. The distribution of network functions over different hosts and more flexible routing caused by service function chaining raise new challenges for end-to-end performance analysis. In this paper, as a first step, we analyze an end-to-end communi…
Network Service Chaining (NSC) is a service deployment concept that promises increased flexibility and cost efficiency for future carrier networks. NSC has received considerable attention in the standardization and research communities lately. However, NSC is largely undefined in the peer-reviewed literature. In fact, a literature review reveals that the role of NSC enabling technologies is up for discussion, and so are the key research challenges lying ahead. This paper addresses these topics by motivating our research interest towards advanced dynamic NSC and detailing the main aspects to be…
In this paper, we address the inefficient handling of traditional security functions in Zero Trust (ZT) networks. For this reason, we propose a novel network security concept that combines the ideas of ZT and Service Function Chaining (SFC). This allows us to efficiently decide which security functions to apply to which packets and when.
Service Function Chaining (SFC) allows the forwarding of a traffic flow along a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs, e.g., IDS, firewall, and NAT). Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions can be used to support SFC reducing the management complexity and the operational costs. One of the most critical issues for the service and network providers is the reduction of energy consumption, which should be achieved without impact to the quality of services. In this paper, we propose a novel resource (re)allocation architecture which enables energy-aware SFC for SDN-based networks. To this en…
Service Function Chaining (SFC) is the problem of deploying various network service instances over geographically distributed data centers and providing inter-connectivity among them. The goal is to enable the network traffic to flow smoothly through the underlying network, resulting in an optimal quality of experience to the end-users. Proper chaining of network functions leads to optimal utilization of distributed resources. This has been a de-facto model in the telecom industry with network functions deployed over underlying hardware. Though this model has served the telecom industry well s…
Current networks more and more rely on virtualized middleboxes to flexibly provide security, protocol optimization, and policy compliance functionalities. As such, delivering these services requires that the traffic be steered through the desired sequence of virtual appliances. Current solutions introduce a new logically centralized entity, often called orchestrator, needing to build its own holistic view of the whole network so to decide where to direct the traffic. We advocate that such a centralized orchestration is not necessary and that, on the contrary, the same objectives can be achieve…
There is an increasing trend that enterprises outsource their network functions to the cloud for lower cost and ease of management. However, network function outsourcing brings threats to the privacy of enterprises since the cloud is able to access the traffic and rules of in-cloud network functions. Current tools for secure network function outsourcing either incur large performance overhead or do not support real-time updates. In this paper, we present SICS, a secure service function chain outsourcing framework. SICS encrypts each packet header and use a label for in-cloud rule matching, whi…
Value-added services (e.g., overlaid video advertisements) have become an integral part of today's Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). To offer cost-efficient, scalable and more agile provisioning of new value-added services in CDNs, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigm may be leveraged to allow implementation of fine-grained services as a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to be placed in CDN. The manner in which these chains are placed is critical as it both affects the quality of service (QoS) and provider cost. The problem is however, very challenging due to the specifics o…
We consider the IPv6 Segment Routing (SRv6) technology for Service Function Chaining of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Most of the VNFs are legacy VNFs (not aware of the SRv6 technology) and expect to process traditional IP packets. An SR proxy is needed to support them. We have extended the implementation of SRv6 in the Linux kernel, realizing an SR-proxy, referred to as SRNK (SR-Proxy Native Kernel). The performance of the proposed solution (SRNKv1) has been evaluated, identifying a poor scalability with respect to the number of VNFs to be supported in a node. Therefore we provided a seco…
Along with the increasing demand for latencysensitive services and applications, Deterministic Network (DetNet) concept has been recently proposed to investigate deterministic latency assurance for services featured with bounded latency requirements in 5G edge networks. The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to flexibly place Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) achieving performance and cost benefits. Then, Service Function Chains (SFC) are formed by steering traffic through a series of VNF instances in a predefined order. Moreover, the requ…
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) and network virtualization technologies are important enablers for fifth-generation (5G) networks to deliver diverse applications and services. Services are often provided as fully connected virtual network functions (VNF)s, through service function chaining (SFC). However, the problem of allocating SFC resources at the network edge still faces many challenges related to the way VNFs are placed, chained and scheduled. In this paper, to solve these problems, we propose a game theory-based approach with the objective to reduce service latency in the context of S…
In this paper, we study end-to-end service reliability in Data Center Networks (DCN) with flow and Service Function Chains (SFCs) parallelism. In our approach, we consider large flows to i) be split into multiple parallel smaller sub-flows; ii) SFC along with their VNFs are replicated into at least as many VNF instances as there are sub-flows, resulting in parallel sub-SFCs; and iii) all sub-flows are distributed over multiple shortest paths and processed in parallel by parallel sub-SFCs. We study service reliability as a function of flow and SFC parallelism and placement of parallel active an…
Although network functions virtualization and software-defined networking offer many dynamic features such as flexibility, scalability, and programmability for easy provisioning of services at a lesser cost and time through service function chaining, it introduces new challenges in terms of reliability, availability, and latency of services. Particularly, softwarization of network and service functions (e.g., virtualization, anything as a service, dynamic virtual chaining, and routing) impose high possibility of network failures due to software issues than hardware. In this letter, we propose …
Value-added Services (VASs) (e.g. dynamic site acceleration, media management) play a critical role in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) enables the agile provisioning of VASs. In NFV settings, VASs are provisioned as ordered sets of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), forming VNF-Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FG) which are deployed in the CDN infrastructure. The CDN VAS VNF-FGs have a specific characteristic: they have one end-point (corresponding to the content server) that is unknown, prior to their placement. The proposals for CDN VAS VNF-FG placement, so far,…
In this paper, we address the resource provisioning problem for service function chaining (SFC) in terms of the placement and chaining of virtual network functions (VNFs) within a multi-access edge computing (MEC) infrastructure to reduce service delay. We consider the VNFs as the main entities of the system and propose a mean-field game (MFG) framework to model their behavior for their placement and chaining. Then, to achieve the optimal resource provisioning policy without considering the system control parameters, we reduce the proposed MFG to a Markov decision process (MDP). In this way, w…
Service function chaining (SFC) is promising to implement flexible and scalable virtual network infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). Edge computing is envisioned to be an effective solution to process huge amount of IoT application data. In order to uniformly provide services to IoT applications among the distributed edge computing nodes (ECNs), we present a unified SFC orchestration framework based on the coordination of SDN and NFV, which provides a synergic edge cloud platform by exploiting the connectivity of FiWi access networks. In addition, we study the VNF deployment proble…
With the advent of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Physical Network Functions (PNFs) are gradually being replaced by Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) that are hosted on general purpose servers. Depending on the call flows for specific services, the packets need to pass through an ordered set of network functions (physical or virtual) called Service Function Chains (SFC) before reaching the destination. Conceivably for the next few years during this transition, these networks would have a mix of PNFs and VNFs, which brings an interesting mix of network problems that are studied in this p…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are technologies that recently acquired a great momentum thanks to their promise of being a flexible and cost-effective solution for replacing hardware-based, vendor-dependent network middleboxes with software appliances running on general purpose hardware in the cloud. Delivering end-to-end networking services across multiple NFV/SDN network domains by implementing the so-called Service Function Chain (SFC) i.e., a sequence of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) that composes the service, is a challenging task. In this pa…
The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm has been devised as an enabler of next generation network infrastructures by speeding up the provisioning and the composition of novel network services. The latter are implemented via a chain of virtualized network functions, a process known as Service Function Chaining. In this paper, we evaluate the availability of multi-tenant SFC infrastructures, where every network function is modeled as a multi-state system and is shared among different and independent tenants. To this aim, we propose a Universal Generating Function (UGF) approach, suita…
Southwest Minzu University(西南民族大学);UESTC(电子科技大学);Temple University(天普大学);University of Idaho(爱达荷大学)
With the ever growing diversity of devices and applications that will be connected to 5G networks, flexible and agile service orchestration with acknowledged QoE that satisfies end-user's functional and QoS requirements is necessary. SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) are considered key enabling technologies for 5G core networks. In this regard, this paper proposes a reinforcement learning based QoS/QoE-aware Service Function Chaining (SFC) in SDN/NFV-enabled 5G slices. First, it implements a lightweight QoS information collector based on LLDP, which wo…
Handong Global University(韩东国际大学);Pohang University of Science and Technology(浦项科技大学)
In the management of computer network systems, the service function chaining (SFC) modules play an important role by generating efficient paths for network traffic through physical servers with virtualized network functions (VNF). To provide the highest quality of services, the SFC module should generate a valid path quickly even in various network topology situations including dynamic VNF resources, various requests, and changes of topologies. The previous supervised learning method demonstrated that the network features can be represented by graph neural networks (GNNs) for the SFC task. How…
Handong Global University(韩东国际大学);Norwegian University of Science and Technology(挪威科技大学);Pohang University of Science and Technology(浦项科技大学)
Software-defined networking (SDN) and the network function virtualization (NFV) led to great developments in software based control technology by decreasing expenditures. Service function chaining (SFC) is an important technology to find efficient paths in network servers to process all of the requested virtualized network functions (VNF). However, SFC is challenging since it has to maintain high Quality of Service (QoS) even for complicated situations. Although some works have been conducted for such tasks with high-level intelligent models like deep neural networks (DNNs), those approaches a…
As the increase in satellite number and variety, satellite ground stations should be required to offer user services in a flexible and efficient manner. Network function virtualization (NFV) can provide a new paradigm to allocate network resources on-demand for user services over the underlying network. However, most of the existing work focuses on the virtual network function (VNF) placement and routing traffic problem for enterprise data center networks, the issue needs to further study in satellite communication scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the VNF placement and routing traffic …
In this paper, we first introduce the NFV architecture and the use of IPv6 Segment Routing (SRv6) network programming model to support Service Function Chaining in a NFV scenario. We describe the concepts of SR-aware and SR-unaware Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). The detailed design of a network domain supporting VNF chaining through the SRv6 network programming model is provided. The operations to support SR-aware and SR-unaware VNFs are described at an architectural level and in particular we propose a solution for SR-unaware VNFs hosted in a NFV node. The proposed solution has been implem…
Dynamic and flexible optical networking enabled by NFV and SDN are the key technology enablers for supporting the dynamicity and bandwidth requirements of emerging 5G network services. To achieve the objective of 5G, Network Services (NSes) must be often deployed transparently over multiple administrative and technological domains. Such case often presents security risks since a typical NS may comprise a chain of network functions, each executed in different remote locations, and tampering within the network infrastructure may compromise their communication. To avoid such threats, QKD has been…
For NFV systems, the key design space includes the function chaining for network requests and resource scheduling for servers. The problem is challenging since NFV systems usually require multiple (often conflicting) design objectives and the computational efficiency of real-time decision making with limited information. Furthermore, the benefits of predictive scheduling to NFV systems still remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose POSCARS, an efficient predictive and online service chaining and resource scheduling scheme that achieves tunable trade-offs among various system metrics with q…
Streaming high quality videos consumes significantly large amount of network resources. In this context request to service delay, network traffic, congestion and server overloading are the main parameters to be considered in video streaming over the internet that effect the quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture as a cluster of proxy servers and clients that uses a peer to peer (P2P) approach to cooperatively stream the video using chaining technique. We consider the following two key issues in the proposed architecture (1) Prefix caching technique to acc…
Multi-Timescale Online Optimization of Network Function Virtualization for Service Chaining
Fudan University(复旦大学);Macquarie University(麦考瑞大学);Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)(联邦科学与工业研究组织);University of Minnesota(明尼苏达大学);University of Technology Sydney(悉尼科技大学)
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims to abstract the functionality of traditional proprietary hardware into software as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), which can run on commercial off the shelf (COTS) servers. Besides reducing dependency on proprietary support, NFV helps network operators to deploy multiple services in a agile fashion. Service deployment involves placement and in sequence routing through VNFs comprising a Service Chain (SC). Our study is the first to focus on the computationally complex problem of multiple VNF SC placement and routing while considering VNF service chai…
The number of smart devices wear and carry by users is growing rapidly which is driven by innovative new smart wearables and interesting service o erings. This has led to applications that utilize multiple devices around the body to provide immersive environments such as mixed reality. These applications rely on a number of di erent types of functions such as sensing, communication and various types of processing, that require considerable resources. Thus one of the major challenges in supporting of these applications is dependent on the battery lifetime of the devices that provide the necessa…
Named Data Networking (NDN) offers promising advantages in deploying next-generation service applications over distributed computing networks. We consider the problem of dynamic orchestration over a NDN-based computing network, in which nodes can be equipped with communication, computation, and data producing resources. Given a set of services with function-chaining structures, we address the design of distributed online algorithm that controls each node to make adaptive decisions on flowing service requests, committing function implementations, and/or producing data. We design a Service Disco…
In the framework of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), the reliability of Service Function Chain (SFC), -- an end-to-end service is presented by a chain of virtual network functions (VNFs), is a complex function of placement, configuration and deployment requirements, both in hardware and software. Previous reliability analysis models cannot be directly applied to SFC because they do not consider aspects of system component sharing, heterogeneity of system components and their interdependency in case of failures. In this paper, we analyze service reliability of complex SFC configurations, …
Augmented information (AgI) services allow users to consume information that results from the execution of a chain of service functions that process source information to create real-time augmented value. Applications include real-time analysis of remote sensing data, real-time computer vision, personalized video streaming, and augmented reality, among others. We consider the problem of optimal distribution of AgI services over a wireless computing network, in which nodes are equipped with both communication and computing resources. We characterize the wireless computing network capacity regio…
Most softwarized telco services are conveniently framed as Service Function Chains (SFCs). Indeed, being structured as a combination of interconnected nodes, service chains may suffer from the single point of failure problem, meaning that an individual node malfunctioning could compromise the whole chain operation. To guarantee "highly available" (HA) levels, service providers are required to introduce redundancy strategies to achieve specific availability demands, where cost constraints have to be taken into account as well. Along these lines we propose HASFC (standing for High Availability S…
The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm is enabling flexibility, programmability and implementation of traditional network functions into generic hardware, in form of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). To provide services, the VNFs are commonly concatenated in a certain ordered sequence, known as Service Function Chains (SFCs). SFCs are usually required to meeting a certain level of reliability. This creates the need to place the VNFs while optimizing reliability jointly with other objectives, such as network and server load balancing. Traditional migration and replication mechanisms…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Service Function Chaining (SFC) have been widely used to enable flexible and agile network management. To enhance reliability, some research has proposed to deploy backup function instances for prompt recovery when a primary instance fails. While most of the recent studies focus on speeding up recovery, less attention has been paid to the problem of minimizing the state update cost. In this work, we present PiggyBackup (Piggyback-based Backup), an efficient backup instance deployment and update protocol. Our key idea is to reuse the existing service ch…
Enterprise network traffic typically traverses a sequence of middleboxes forming a service function chain, or simply a chain. Tolerating failures when they occur along chains is imperative to the availability and reliability of enterprise applications. Making a chain fault-tolerant is challenging since, in the event of failures, the state of faulty middleboxes must be correctly and quickly recovered while providing high throughput and low latency. In this paper, we introduce FTC, novel system design and protocol for fault-tolerant service function chaining. FTC provides strong consistency with…
With the advent of Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) or Service Function Chaining (SFC), operators expect networks to support flexible services beyond the mere forwarding of packets. The network programmability framework which is being developed within the IETF by leveraging IPv6 Segment Routing enables the realisation of in-network functions. In this paper, we demonstrate that this vision of in-network programmability can be realised. By leveraging the eBPF support in the Linux kernel, we implement a flexible framework that allows network operators to enco…
Network Function Virtualization (NFV), network slicing, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are the key enablers of the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G). Service Function Chaining (SFC) plays a critical role in delivering sophisticated service per slice and enables traffic traversal through a set of ordered Service Functions (SFs). In fully symmetric SFCs, the uplink and downlink traffic traverse the same SFs, while in asymmetric SFC, the reverse-path may not necessarily cross the same SFs in the reverse order. Proposed approaches in the literature support either full symmetry or no …
Virtual network services that span multiple data centers are important to support emerging data-intensive applications in fields such as bioinformatics and retail analytics. Successful virtual network service composition and maintenance requires flexible and scalable 'constrained shortest path management' both in the management plane for virtual network embedding (VNE) or network function virtualization service chaining (NFV-SC), as well as in the data plane for traffic engineering (TE). In this paper, we show analytically and empirically that leveraging constrained shortest paths within recen…
Augmented reality (AR) has drawn great attention in recent years. However, current AR devices have drawbacks, e.g., weak computation ability and large power consumption. To solve the problem, mobile edge computing (MEC) can be introduced as a key technology to offload data and computation from AR devices to MEC servers via 5th Generation Mobile Communication Technology (5G) networks. To this end, a context-based MEC platform for AR services in 5G networks is proposed in this paper. On the platform, MEC is employed as a data processing center while AR devices are simplified as universal input/o…
computers into the real world, to serve humans where the ubiquitous network is the underneath infrastructure. In order to provide ubiquitous services (u-Service) which deliver useful information to service users without human intervention, this paper implements a proactive information delivery system using Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth is a lowpowered networking service that supports several protocol profiles, most importantly file transfer.Combined together, ubiquitous computing and Bluetooth ha e the potential to furnish ubiquitous solutions (u-Solutions) that are efficient, employ simplif…
Using Service Function Chaining (SFC) in wireless networks became popular in many domains like networking and multimedia. It relies on allocating network resources to incoming SFCs requests, via a Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) algorithm, so that it optimizes the performance of the SFC. When the load of incoming requests -- competing for the limited network resources - increases, it becomes challenging to decide which requests should be admitted and which one should be rejected. In this work, we propose a deep Reinforcement learning (RL) solution that can learn the admission policy for differ…
Fixed and mobile telecom operators, enterprise network operators and cloud providers strive to face the challenging demands coming from the evolution of IP networks (e.g. huge bandwidth requirements, integration of billions of devices and millions of services in the cloud). Proposed in the early 2010s, Segment Routing (SR) architecture helps face these challenging demands, and it is currently being adopted and deployed. SR architecture is based on the concept of source routing and has interesting scalability properties, as it dramatically reduces the amount of state information to be configure…
To fend off network ossification and support high degrees of flexibility and various services, network virtualization and slicing are introduced for the next-generation wireless cellular networks. These two technologies allow diversifying attributes of the future inter-networking and time-varying workloads based resource management paradigms. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end (E2E) resource allocation framework for future networks considering radio and core network by leveraging network function virtualization (NFV). We aim to minimize the network cost defined based on the utilized energ…
The SRv6 architecture (Segment Routing based on IPv6 data plane) is a promising solution to support services like Traffic Engineering, Service Function Chaining and Virtual Private Networks in IPv6 backbones and datacenters. The SRv6 architecture has interesting scalability properties as it reduces the amount of state information that needs to be configured in the nodes to support the network services. In this paper, we describe the advantages of complementing the SRv6 technology with an SDN based approach in backbone networks. We discuss the architecture of a SRv6 enabled network based on Lin…
Tarbiat Modares University(塔比亚特·莫达雷斯大学);Shahrood University of Technology(沙赫鲁德工业大学);TU Braunschweig(布伦瑞克工业大学)
In this paper, we propose a joint radio and core resource allocation framework for NFV-enabled networks. In the proposed system model, the goal is to maximize energy efficiency (EE), by guaranteeing end-to-end (E2E) quality of service (QoS) for different service types. To this end, we formulate an optimization problem in which power and spectrum resources are allocated in the radio part. In the core part, the chaining, placement, and scheduling of functions are performed to ensure the QoS of all users. This joint optimization problem is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), considering t…