Energy-Aware Deployment of Parallelized SFCs With Delay and Reliability Constraints for Smart Firefighting

Smart firefighting utilizes advanced information technologies to enhance disaster prevention and emergency response capabilities. The deployment of Service Function Chains (SFCs) in smart firefighting involves orchestrating a series of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) as software instances on edge servers, enabling flexible and efficient service provisioning for firefighting applications. Security-enhancing VNFs, such as data encryption modules and firewalls, are deployed to strengthen the security of the smart firefighting system. A significant challenge in smart firefighting SFCs is ensuring strict low-delay and reliability constraints while optimizing energy efficiency. Traditional sequential SFCs introduce substantial end-to-end delays, rendering them unsuitable for delay-sensitive applications. Parallelized SFC addresses this issue by multiple independent VNFs in an SFC to run in parallel. In this paper, the deployment of parallelized SFCs for smart firefighting is formulated as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model. Since the NP-hard nature of the ILP model, we proposed a heuristic scheme named EADRC to minimize energy consumption while satisfying reliability and end-to-end delay constraints. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of EADRC, achieving significant reductions in energy consumption, as well as improved SFC acceptance ratio and reliability compared to baseline approaches.