Network Function Virtualization; Techno-Economics

Speaker : Mathis Obadia
Telecom ParisTech and Thales
Date: 07/09/2016
Time: 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Location: LINCS Meeting Room 40

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging approach
that has received attention from both academia and industry as a way to
improve flexibility, efficiency, and manageability of networks. NFV
enables new ways to operate networks and to provide composite network
services, opening the path toward new business models. As in cloud
computing with the Infrastructure as a Service model, clients will be
offered the capability to provision and instantiate Virtual Network
Functions (VNF) on the NFV infrastructure of the network operators. In
this paper, we consider the case where leftover VNF capacities are
offered for bid. This approach is particularly interesting for clients
to punctually provision resources to absorb peak or unpredictable
demands and for operators to increase their revenues. We propose a game
theoretic approach and make use of Multi-Unit Combinatorial Auctions to
select the winning clients and the price they pay. Such a formulation
allows clients to express their VNF requests according to their
specific objectives. We solve this problem with a greedy heuristic and
prove that this approximation of economic efficiency is the closest
attainable in polynomial time and provides a payment system that
motivates bidders to submit their true valuations. Simulation results
show that the proposed heuristic achieves a market valuation close to
the optimal (less than 10 % deviation) and guarantees that an important
part of this valuation is paid as revenue to the operator. Joint work
with Jean-Louis Rougier, Luigi Iannone, Mathieu Bouet and Vania Conan,
to appear at ITC28 [21]https://itc28.org/