Availability-Aware VNF Placement for uRLLC Applications in MEC-Enabled 5G Networks

In this paper, we study the VNF placement problem in MEC-enabled 5G networks to meet the stringent reliability and latency requirements of uRLLC applications. We pose it as a constrained optimization problem, which is NP-hard, to maximize the total reward obtained by a network service provider by serving uRLLC service requests. We propose an approximated randomized rounding approach to solve the NP-hard optimization problem in polynomial time. We prove that the proposed randomized approach achieves performance guarantees while violating the resource constraints in a bounded way. Furthermore, we present a greedy-heuristic approach to tackle the violations in the resource constraints. Simulation results show the proposed approach yields close-to-optimal performance. Specifically, the total reward is within 5% and 10% of the optimal solution using the proposed randomized rounding and greedy approaches, respectively.