An efficient virtualized network function deployment scheme for service function chain using deep Q‐network

Summary Virtualized network functions (VNFs) are virtualized network services running on the network functions virtualization infrastructure in order to replace physical hardware. Integrating with software defined networking and network functions virtualization, internet service providers (ISPs) can chain VNFs together, called service function chain (SFC), to provide various network service demands with virtual links. Many studies have proposed for the VNFs deployment under different objectives, for example, energy, delay, quality of service (QoS), and quality of experience (QoE). From the aspects of both ISPs and customers, both energy consumption and QoE are the primary concerns for the purpose of operating expense reduction and users' satisfaction. This paper proposes a QoS/QoE/energy‐aware deep Q‐network (DQN)‐based scheme, called DQN‐QQE for VNFs deployment under the consideration of both energy consumption and QoE requirement with QoS constraints. The reward of the proposed scheme is formulated by the Weber‐Fechner law and the exponential interdependency of QoE and QoS (IQX) hypothesis. Afterwards, we compared the proposed DQN‐QQE to the QoS/QoE‐aware approach DQN‐Q2‐SFC, brute force, and randomness in terms of energy, QoE, error rate, and processing time. The simulation results revealed that DQN‐QQE is more stable and is better than DQN‐Q2‐SFC and randomness approach in terms of energy, QoE, and error rate. The average processing time and energy consumption of the proposed DQN‐QQE was 43% and 11% less than DQN‐Q2‐SFC, respectively. Although brute force approach is better than others in terms of energy, QoE, and error rate, the processing time of brute force approach is nearly 20 times larger than the proposed DQN‐QQE.