  Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC)
play crucial roles in 5G networks for dynamically provisioning diverse
communication services with heterogeneous service requirements. In particular,
while NFV improves flexibility and scalability by softwarizing physical network
functions as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), MEC enables to provide
delay-sensitive/time-critical services by moving computing facilities to the
network edge. However, these new paradigms introduce challenges in terms of
latency, availability, and resource allocation. In this paper, we first explore
MEC cloud facility location selection and then latency-aware placement of VNFs
in different selected locations of NFV enabled MEC cloud facilities in order to
meet the ultra-low latency requirements of different applications (e.g.,
Tactile Internet, virtual reality, and mission-critical applications).
Furthermore, we also aim to guarantee the survivability of VNFs and an edge
server against failures in resource limited MEC cloud facility due to software
bugs, configuration faults, etc. To this end, we formulate the problem of
latency-aware and survivable mapping of VNFs in different MEC cloud facilities
as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to minimize the overall service
provisioning cost, and show that the problem is NP-hard. Owing to the high
computational complexity of solving the ILP, we propose a simulated annealing
based heuristic algorithm to obtain near-optimal solution in polynomial time.
With extensive simulations, we show the effectiveness of our proposed solution
in a real-world network topology, which performs close to the optimal solution.
