NFV-Enabled multicasting in mobile edge clouds with resource sharing

Driven by stringent delay requirements of mobile applications, the mobile edge cloud has emerged as a major platform to offer low latency network services from the edge of networks. Most conventional network services are implemented via hardware-based network functions, such as firewalls and load balancers, to guarantee service security and performance. However, implementing such hardware-based network functions incurs high purchase and maintenance costs. Network function virtualization (NFV) as a promising technology exhibits great potential to reduce the purchase and maintenance costs by implementing network functions as software in virtual machines (VMs). In this paper, we consider a fundamental problem of NFV-enabled multicasting in a mobile edge cloud, where each multicast request requires to process its traffic in a specified sequence of network functions (referred to as a service chain) before the traffic from a source to a set of destinations. We devise a provable approximation algorithm with an approximation ratio for the problem if requests do not have delay requirements; otherwise, we propose an efficient heuristic for it. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms against the state-of-the-art NFV-enabled multicasting algorithms, and results show that our algorithms outperform their counterparts.