Cost minimization of network services with buffer and end-to-end deadline constraints

Cloud computing technology provides the means to share physical resources among multiple users and data center ten- ants by exposing them as virtual resources. There is a strong industrial drive to use similar technology and concepts to provide timing sensitive services. One such is virtual net- working services, so called services chains, which consist of several interconnected virtual network functions. This al- lows for the capacity to be scaled up and down by adding or removing virtual resources. In this work, we develop a model of a service chain and pose the dynamic allocation of resources as an optimization problem. We design and present a set of strategies to allot virtual network nodes in an optimal fashion subject to latency and buffer constraints.