Resilient Control Plane Design for Virtualized 6G Core Networks

Abstract

With the advent of 6G and its mission-critical and tactile Internet applications running in a virtualized environment on the same physical infrastructure, even the shortest service disruptions have severe consequences for thousands of users. Therefore, the network hypervisors, which enable such virtualization, should tolerate failures or be able to adapt to sudden traffic fluctuations instantaneously, i.e., should be well-prepared for such unpredictable environmental changes. In this paper, we propose a latency-aware dual hypervisor placement and control path design method, which protects against single-link and hypervisor failures and is ready for unknown future changes. We prove that finding the minimum number of hypervisors is not only NP-hard, but also hard to approximate. We propose optimal and heuristic algorithms to solve the problem. We conduct thorough simulations to demonstrate the efficiency of our method on real-world optical topologies, and show that with an appropriately selected representative set of possible future requests, we are not only able to approach the maximum possible acceptance ratio but also able to mitigate the need of frequent hypervisor migrations for most realistic latency constraints.