ED-VNE: A profit-oriented VNE optimization scheme of energy and delay in 5G SlaaS

Abstract

In 5G Slice-as-a-Service (SlaaS), supporting ultra-low delay is an essential network capability for 5G infrastructure providers (InPs). However, network slicing in 5G SlaaS has a more critical conflict in delay and cost than previous generations, which brings profit-risk to InPs. An effective way to fix the issue is performing joint optimization of delay and energy in the virtual network embedding (VNE) of SlaaS. Previous studies in VNE are unsuitable for the optimization in 5G SlaaS because (i) the mutual feedback on VNE policy and substrate nodes’ status complicates the energy-aware VNE, and (ii) the tradeoff between delay and energy consumption in 5G InPs. Therefore, we propose a novel VNE scheme called ED-VNE, which jointly optimizes the end-to-end (E2E) delay and energy to improve the profit of InPs. ED-VNE first introduces the substrate nodes’ energy state into the VNE process. And then, ED-VNE performs optimization to synchronously reduce the E2E delay of network slicing and energy consumption, to finally improve the profit. Compared to existing solutions, simulation results indicate that ED-VNE can decrease the delay and energy consumption by up to 33.74% and 32.56% while increasing the profit of InPs by up to 50.44%.