Applications that rely on remote communication, collaboration and sensing are becoming more and more distributed over large networks and are demanding increasing amounts of computational and networking resources. Next-generation services typically deal with ultra-low latency and high-throughput requirements that cannot be met by monolithic deployments. Such applications are instantiated as Service Function Chains (SFC), involving multiple multi-tenant components that are often AI-based themselves.

Efficient orchestration strategies for computational resources are primordial to complement the network management solutions and provide efficient and high-throughput data processing. Highly dynamic, AI-based micro-service provisioning is required to circumvent current resource fragmentation problems among multiple network and service providers and reduce execution times along the end-to-end path of the service chain, while ensuring reliability, scalability, security and energy-efficiency.