Migration and Energy Aware Network Traffic Prediction Method Based on LSTM in NFV Environment.

The network function virtualization (NFV) uses virtualization technology to separate software from hardware. One of the most important challenges of NFV is the resource management of virtual network functions (VNFs). According to the dynamic nature of NFV, the resource allocation of VNFs must be changed to adapt to the variations of incoming network traffic. However, the significant delay may be happened because of the reallocation of resources. In order to balance the performance between delay and quality of service, this paper firstly made a compromise between VNF migration and energy consumption. Then, the long short-term memory (LSTM) was utilized to forecast network traffic. Also, the asymmetric loss function for LSTM (LO-LSTM) was proposed to increase the predicted value to a certain extent. Finally, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of LO-LSTM. The results demonstrated that the proposed LO-LSTM can not only reduce migration times, but also make the energy consumption increment within an acceptable range.