Multi-objective VNF Placement Optimization with NSGA-III

Abstract

With the rising acceptance of virtual network functions (VNFs) as a replacement for traditional network functions, the optimal placement of VNFs has become a crucial task for ensuring constant performance within constrained resources. This research investigates the challenge of mapping and scheduling VNFs as a multi-objective optimization problem. The state-of-the-art methods have focused on optimizing the mapping or scheduling of VNFs while considering one or two objectives continuously. In this study, we aim to optimize two objectives: minimizing the link capacity cost and maximizing the average resource utilization of each virtual machine. To address this problem, an adaptation of the NSGA-III optimization algorithm is proposed and thoroughly evaluated through a set of experiments. In terms of objective values, the results outlined that the proposed method outperformed the other methods of comparison by a significant margin.