SFC-Based Service Provisioning for 6G Satellite-Ground Integrated Networks

Abstract

The satellite-ground integrated networks (SGIN) are important trend of 6G mobile communication networks development. However, coordinating heterogeneous physical resources is very challenging in such a largescale dynamic network. In this paper, a flexible service provisioning based on service function chaining (SFC) is exploited to address the challenge. The inherent issue is how to scale virtual network function (VNF) instances in largescale heterogeneous networks, considering dynamics of network and service traffic. We formulate the VNF scaling problem as an integer non-linear programming problem (INLP), which is NP-hard. Then, a heuristic algorithm is proposed, which considers different features of nodes as well as dynamic matching of network capacity and service traffic. The simulations show that our proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal performance in cost of network and successfully serving probability.