Xu, ZichuanZhang, YutongLiang, WeifaXia, QiufenRana, OmerGalis, AlexWu, GuoweiZhou, Pan2024-02-14August 2-8978-1-4503-6295-5http://hdl.handle.net/1885/313586Driven by stringent delay requirements of mobile applications, the mobile edge cloud has emerged as a major platform to offer low latency network services from the edge of networks. Most conventional network services are implemented via hardware-based network functions, such as firewalls and load balancers, to guarantee service security and performance. However, implementing such hardware-based network functions incurs high purchase and maintenance costs. Network function virtualization (NFV) as a promising technology exhibits great potential to reduce the purchase and maintenance costs by implementing network functions as software in virtual machines (VMs). In this paper, we consider a fundamental problem of NFV-enabled multicasting in a mobile edge cloud, where each multicast request requires to process its traffic in a specified sequence of network functions (referred to as a service chain) before the traffic from a source to a set of destinations. We devise a provable approximation algorithm with an approximation ratio for the problem if requests do not have delay requirements; otherwise, we propose an efficient heuristic for it. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms against the state-of-the-art NFV-enabled multicasting algorithms, and results show that our algorithms outperform their counterparts.The work of Zichuan Xu, Qiufen Xia, and Guowei Wu is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61802048, 61802047, 61772113, 61872053), the fundamental research funds for the central universities in China (Grant No. DUT17RC(3)061, DUT17RC(3)070, DUT19RC(4)035, DUT19GJ204), and the Xinghai Scholar Program in Dalian University of Technology, China. The work by Alex Galis is supported by EU NECOS projects (777067).application/pdfen-AU© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.NFV-Enabled multicasting in mobile edge clouds with resource sharing201910.1145/3337821.33378252022-10-02