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 tenants 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 networking services, so called services chains, which consist of several interconnected virtual network functions. This allows 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.