A Lightweight Heuristic for Micro-services Placement and Chaining in Low Latency Services

The rise of novel Low-Latency (LL) applications, such as cloud gaming or the metaverse, imposes rigorous end-to-end LL constraints. Decomposing Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) into micro-services has proven its effectiveness to reduce the Service Function Chaining (SFC) latency thanks to key characteristics: lighter entities, less resource consumption, and a strong capacity to operate in parallel. However, to make such a promising technology actually deployed in real operated networks, novel dedicated placement and chaining methods are required. Current solutions either do not fit with tied LL constraints or exhibit a prohibitive computation time by relying on exact resolution methods. In this paper, we propose a heuristic method dedicated to the placement and chaining of microservices. Its purpose is to maximize the deployment of SFCs while respecting the required LL by considering intrinsic features of micro-services and integrating suitable load balancing, which makes it highly scalable. A comprehensive evaluation campaign highlights that generated solutions achieve results that are at most a factor of 1.1 to the optimal with an execution time up to 20,000 times faster.