Coping with Emerging Mobile Social Media Applications through Dynamic Service Function Chaining
Résumé
User generated content (UGC)-based applications
are gaining lots of popularity among the community of mobile
internet users. They are populating video platforms and are shared
through different online social services, giving rise to the so-called
mobile social media applications. These applications are characterized
by communication sessions that frequently and dynamically
update content, shared with a potential number of mobile
users, sharing the same location or being dispersed over a wide
geographical area. Since most of UGC content of mobile social
media applications are exchanged through mobile devices, it is
expected that along with online social applications, these content
will cause severe congestion to mobile networks, impacting both
their core and radio access networks. In this paper, we address the
challenges introduced by these applications devising a complete
framework that 1) identifies such applications/sessions and 2) initiates
multicast-based delivery (or offload through WiFi) of the
relevant content. The proposed framework leverages the network
function virtualization (NFV) paradigm to dynamically integrate
its functionalities to the operators’ service function chaining (SFC)
process, allowing fast deployment and lowering both capital and
operational expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX) of the mobile operators.
The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated
through mathematical analysis and computer simulations, taking
Twitter-like social applications as an example.