Cloud and fog computing along with network function virtualization technology have significantly shifted the development of network architectures. They yield in reduced capital and operating expenditures, while achieving network flexibility and scalability to accommodate the massive growth in data traffic volumes from user terminals requesting various services and applications. Now cloud solutions here offer abundant computing and storage resources, at the detriment of high end-to-end delays, hence limiting quality of service for delay-sensitive applications. Meanwhile, fog solutions offer reduced delays, at the detriment of limited resources. Existing efforts focus on merging the two solutions and propose multi-tier hybrid fog-cloud architectures to leverage their both saliencies. However, these approaches can be inefficient when the applications are delay-sensitive and require high resources. Hence this work proposes a novel standalone heterogeneous fog architecture that is composed of high-capacity and low-capacity fog nodes, both located at the terminals proximity. Thereby, realizing a substrate network that offers reduced delays and high resources, without the need to relay to the cloud nodes. Moreover, the work here leverages and deploys a deep learning network to propose a service function chain provisioning scheme implemented on this architecture. The scheme predicts the popular network functions, and maps them on the high-capacity nodes, whereas it predicts the unpopular network functions and maps them on the low-capacity nodes. The goal is to predict the next incoming function and prefetch it on the node. Hence, when a future request demands the same function, it can be cached directly from the node, at reduced resources consumption, processing times, cost, and energy consumption. Also, this yields in higher number of satisfied requests and increased capacity. The deep learning network yields reduced loss model and high success rates.
Fog-radio access networks (F-RANs) alleviate fronthaul delays for cellular networks as compared to their cloud counterparts. This allows them to be suitable solutions for networks that demand low propagation delays. Namely, they are suitable for millimeter wave (mmWave) operations that suffer from short propagation distances and possess a poor scattering environment (low channel ranks). The F-RAN here is comprised of fog nodes that are collocated with radio remote heads (RRHs) to provide local processing capabilities for mobile station (MS) terminals. These terminals demand various network functions (NFs) that correspond to different service requests. Now, provisioning these NFs on the fog nodes also yields service delays due to the requirement for service migration from the cloud, i.e., offloading to the fog nodes. One solution to reduce this service delay is to provide cached copies of popular NFs in advance. Hence, it is critical to study function popularity and allow for content caching at the F-RAN. This is further a necessity given the limited resources at the fog nodes, thus requiring efficient resource management to enhance network capacity at reduced power and cost penalty. This paper proposes novel solutions that allocate popular NFs on the fog nodes to accelerate services for the terminals, namely, the clustered and distributed caching methods. The two methods are analyzed and compared against the baseline uncached provisioning schemes in terms of service delay, energy consumption, and cost.
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