  Along with the increasing demand for latencysensitive services and
applications, Deterministic Network (DetNet) concept has been recently proposed
to investigate deterministic latency assurance for services featured with
bounded latency requirements in 5G edge networks. The Network Function
Virtualization (NFV) technology enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to
flexibly place Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) achieving performance and cost
benefits. Then, Service Function Chains (SFC) are formed by steering traffic
through a series of VNF instances in a predefined order. Moreover, the required
network resources and placement of VNF instances along SFC should be optimized
to meet the deterministic latency requirements. Therefore, it is significant
for ISPs to determine an optimal SFC deployment strategy to ensure network
performance while improving the network revenue. In this paper, we jointly
investigate the resource allocation and SFC placement in 5G edge networks for
deterministic latency assurance. We formulate this problem as a mathematic
programming model with the objective of maximizing the overall network profit
for ISP. Furthermore, a novel Deterministic SFC deployment (Det-SFCD) algorithm
is proposed to efficiently embed SFC requests with deterministic latency
assurance. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm
can provide better performance in terms of SFC request acceptance rate, network
cost reduction, and network resource efficiency compared with benchmark
strategy.
