Redundant Placement of Virtualized Network Functions for LTE evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services

Mobile Operators have experienced a growth of demand of new services with strict requirements and features which imposes challenges to operate the mobile wireless network. To tackle these challenges, Telcos must provide flexible, dynamic network architecture, furnishing resiliency to ensure end-to-end (E2E) service continuity in case of resource failures. Virtualization of the core network elements of cellular Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology has been proposed as a key solution to cope with these new demands. By employing point-to- multipoint services to any wireless device, the LTE eMBMS, allows Mobile Operators (MOs) to send a single stream of data to all mobile users in a specific area. The LTE eMBMS is a potential E2E service technology to leverage costumer experience as well as to optimize use of network resources. We propose to improve the reliability of LTE eMBMS E2E services via redundancy, virtualized network functions (VNF), and autonomic service placement. In this paper, we introduce a redundancy seriesparallel model to improve reliability of LTE eMBMS services. The model is formulated as a VNF redundancy allocation problem (RAP). We employed the particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique to solve the RAP problem to evaluate the performance of the proposed model.