Service-Aware Design Policy of End-to-End Network Slicing for 5G Use Cases

Abstract

End-to-End network slicing is an emerging technology with huge potential to carry flexible resource provisioning for the next generation of mobile networks (5G). With the powerful SDN and NFV technologies, multiple and logical network slices of various services can be deployed to the same underlying infrastructure. Physical resources are flexibly configured for different use cases. Therefore, it is necessary to explore how to guide the implementation of network slices via a general design policy. In this paper, we propose a service-aware network slicing design policy for 5G use cases, not only to satisfy various service requirements for different applications but also to enhance resource efficiency with fluctuated traffic demands. Firstly, multiple design objectives of slices are presented to guarantee different services in diverse use cases. Then we formulate a deterministic optimization model of the network slicing design problem and further extend it into a robust version considering uncertain traffic demands. Besides, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to obtain a promising network slicing design policy with the low computational effort, which is inspired by the multiple-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm. The effectiveness of the present formulations and algorithms is verified by a series of simulations.