Service function chain embedding algorithm with wireless multicast in mobile edge computing network

To resolve the excessive system overhead and serious traffic congestion in user-oriented service function chain (SFC) embedding in mobile edge computing (MEC) networks,a content-oriented joint wireless multicast and SFC embedding algorithm was proposed for the multi-base station and multi-user edge networks with MEC servers.By involving four kinds of system overhead,including service flow,server function sustaining power,server function service power and wireless transmission power,an optimization model was proposed to jointly design SFC embedding with multicast beamforming.Firstly,with Lagrangian dual decomposition,the problem was decoupled into two independent subproblems,namely,SFC embedding and multicast beamforming.Secondly,with the L_p norm penalty term-based successive convex approximation algorithm,the integer programming-based SFC embedding problem was relaxed to an equivalent linear programming one.Finally,the non-convex beamforming optimization problem was transformed into a series of convex ones via the path following technique.Simulation results revealed that the proposed algorithm has good convergence,and is superior to both the optimal SFC embedding with unicasting and random SFC embedding with multicasting in terms of system overhead.