Optimizing Placement and Scheduling for VNF by a Multi-objective Optimization Genetic Algorithm

Virtual network functions (VNFs) have gradually replaced the implementation of traditional network functions. Through efficient placement, the VNF placement technology strives to operate VNFs consistently to the greatest extent possible within restricted resources. Thus, VNF mapping and scheduling tasks can be framed as an optimization problem. Existing research efforts focus only on optimizing the VNFs scheduling or mapping. Besides, the existing methods focus only on one or two objectives. In this work, we proposed addressing the problem of VNFs scheduling and mapping. This work proposed framing the problem of VNFs scheduling and mapping as a multi-objective optimization problem on three objectives, namely (1) minimizing line latency of network link, (2) reducing the processing capacity of each virtual machine, and (3) reducing the processing latency of virtual machines. Then, the proposed VNF-NSGA-III algorithm, an adapted variation of the NSGA-III algorithm, was used to solve this multi-objective problem. Our proposed algorithm has been thoroughly evaluated through a series of experiments on homogeneous and heterogeneous data center environments. The proposed method was compared to several heuristic and recent meta-heuristic methods. The results reveal that the VNF-NSGA-III outperformed the comparison methods.