Intelligent Service Function Chain Mapping Framework for Cloud-and-Edge-Collaborative IoT

With the rapid development of Internet of thing (IoT) technology, it has become a challenge to deal with the increasing number and diverse requirements of IoT services. By combining burgeoning network function virtualization ( NFV) technology with cloud computing and mobile edge computing ( MEC), an NFV-enabled cloud-and-edge-collaborative IoT (CECIoT) architecture can efficiently provide flexible service for IoT traffic in the form of a service function chain (SFC) by jointly utilizing edge and cloud resources. In this promising architecture, a difficult issue is how to balance the consumption of resource and energy in SFC mapping. To overcome this challenge, an intelligent energy-and-resource-balanced SFC mapping scheme is designed in this paper. It takes the comprehensive deployment consumption as the optimization goal, and applies a deep Q-learning(DQL)-based SFC mapping (DQLBM) algorithm as well as an energy-based topology adjustment (EBTA) strategy to make efficient use of the limited network resources, while satisfying the delay requirement of users. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can decrease service delay, as well as energy and resource consumption.