Edge intelligence for service function chain deployment in NFV-enabled networks

With evolution of network function virtualization (NFV), network services can be provided as service function chains (SCs), each consisting of multiple virtual network functions (VNFs). The deployment of SCs including placement of VNF instances and virtual links connecting these functions, onto the substrate physical network is a critical issue which significantly affects the performance of the offered network services. Due to the unpredictable traffic and network state variations, as well as diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements, an online SCs deployment approach is needed to cope with different service requests and real-time network traffics. In this paper, we employ edge intelligence using a distributed deep reinforcement learning approach to deploy SCs in order to jointly balance the load on the physical nodes and links in the edge environments. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of minimizing the drop rate of the incoming service chain requests. In addition, the proposed approach is able to rapidly deploy service flows even in the large real-world network typologies.