QoS-Based Multicast Routing in Network Function Virtualization-Enabled Software-Defined Mobile Edge Computing Networks

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology brings the unprecedented computing capacity to the edge of mobile network. It provides the cloud and end user swift high-quality services with seamless integration of mobile network and Internet. With powerful capability, virtualized network functions can be allocated to MEC. In this paper, we study QoS guaranteed multicasting routing with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in MEC. Specifically, data should pass through a service function chain before reaching destinations along a multicast tree with minimal computational cost and meeting QoS requirements. Furthermore, to overcome the problems of traditional IP multicast and software-defined multicasting approaches, we propose an implementable multicast mechanism that delivers data along multicast tree but uses unicast sessions. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism based on experimental simulations. The results show that our mechanism outperforms others reported in the literature.