A Delay-Aware Deployment Policy for End-to-End 5G Network Slicing

Abstract

5G networks need to support various use cases which may require different quality of service (QoS). Network slicing (NS) is an innovative concept to customize different logical networks from a common general infrastructure for these services. A slice is composed of a set of virtual network functions (VNFs) that can be deployed on standard commodity servers as virtual machines (VMs). However, the packet delay of VMs may be affected by other VMs on the same server. In this paper, we investigate network slice deployment policy to improve the network performance by guaranteeing the latency requirements. Moreover, a realistic mathematical model is formulated, considering the effects of virtualization on end-to-end delay. Due to the diversity of network slices' topologies and various performance requirements, we propose a heuristic algorithm to deploy different network slices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our algorithm can get solutions with reasonable execution time and achieve lower delay and higher acceptance ratio.