Enhanced Virtual Network Function for Cloud Radio Access Networks

Abstract

The rapid increase of the demand for online services heavily influenced the data traffic over the networks. The main reason behind the data traffic over various networks is the increase of mobile computing technologies and the billions of tiny devices that generate frequent data for various IoT based applications [7]. In order to accommodate the data growth, the network operators are pulled down to the situation to deploy more resources to share the computational load over the cloud environment [15]. In this paper, we propose an Enhanced Virtual Network Function (EVNF) Placement strategy for Cloud Radio Access Networks (CRAN) with maximized number of base stations for load balancing on distributed cloud environment. The proposed strategy allows the flexible migration of NF from hardware instance to software instance with the optimized utilization of network resources. This approach not only satisfies the resource and latency constrains, but also achieves the optimal operational cost for the network operators. The simulation results confirm that the new approach performs better compared with the ILP based algorithms and heuristic algorithms in terms of load balancing, network utilization and operational cost for network operators.