Virtual Firewalls Scaling and Placement with Traffic Distribution in Telco Cloud-Edge Continuum

The evolution of the 5G and future 6G networks into a virtualized infrastructure enables the deployment of virtual firewalls (vFW) to protect them from undesirable traffic and other threats. Current orchestration approaches provision vFW instances at network edges. We propose a new virtual Firewall Allocation and Traffic Distribution (vFATD) approach that flexibly allocates and scales vFW instances across the distributed telco cloud-edge continuum to reduce overall vFW system costs. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we designed and evaluated the MILP-based reference orchestration algorithm, as well as k-center- and genetic-evolution-based heuristic algorithms. Experiments using actual traffic data from a mobile network operator confirm that the proposed vFATD algorithm is feasible and can yield significant gains for network providers.