  Network function virtualization (NFV) is a crucial technology for the 5G
network development because it can improve the flexibility of employing
hardware and reduce the construction of base stations. There are vast service
chains in NFV to meet users' requests, which are composed of a sequence of
network functions. These virtual network functions (VNFs) are implemented in
virtual machines by software and virtual environment. How to deploy VMs to
process VNFs of the service chains as soon as possible when users' requests are
received is very challenging to solve by traditional algorithms on a large
scale. Compared with traditional algorithms, quantum computing has better
computational performance because of quantum parallelism. We build an integer
linear programming model of the VNF scheduling problem with the objective of
minimizing delays and transfer it into the quadratic unconstrained binary
optimization (QUBO) model. Our proposed heuristic algorithm employs a quantum
annealer to solve the model. Finally, we evaluate the computational results and
explore the feasibility of leveraging quantum computing to solve the VNFs
scheduling problem.
