A VNF-Chaining Approach for Enhancing Ground Network with UAVs in a Crowd-Based Environment

In the context of a 5G and beyond network operating in a smart city, in which the fixed network infrastructure is supported by a flock of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) operating as carriers of Virtual Network Functions (VNF), we propose a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to place chains of VNFs on a hybrid UAV-terrestrial infrastructure so to maximize the UAV lifetime while considering resource constraints and by taking into account the network traffic originated by crowds of people assembling in the city at given hotpoints. We formalize the UAV deployment problem and we test our solution with a practical scenario based on DoS detection system. The experimental results assess the deployment in a practical scenario of a DoS detection system and show that the proposed solution can effectively enhance the capability of the system to process the input flows under a DoS attack.