TY - JOUR
T1 - On robustness of network slicing for next-generation mobile networks
AU - Wen, Ruihan
AU - Feng, Gang
AU - Tang, Jianhua
AU - Quek, Tony Q.S.
AU - Wang, Gang
AU - Tan, Wei
AU - Qin, Shuang
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 30, 2018; revised June 20, 2018 and August 21, 2018; accepted August 28, 2018. Date of publication September 5, 2018; date of current version January 15, 2019. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation of China under Grant 61631004 and 61871099, by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant ZYGX2015Z005. This work was also supported in part by the MOE ARF Tier 2 under Grant MOE2015-T2-2-104, the SUTD-ZJU Research Collaboration under Grant SUTD-ZJU/RES/01/2016, and the SUTD-ZJU Research Collaboration under Grant SUTD-ZJU/RES/05/2016. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was D. Marabissi. (Corresponding author: Gang Feng.) R. Wen and G. Feng are with the National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Communications and the Center for Intelligent Networking and Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1972-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2019/1
Y1 - 2019/1
N2 - Network slicing is a fundamental architectural technology for the fifth generation mobile network. It is challenging to design a robust end-to-end network slice spanning overall networks, where a slice is constituted by a set of virtual network functions (VNFs) and links. Bugs may accidentally occur in some VNFs, invalidating some slices, and triggering slice recovery processes. Besides, the traffic demands in each slice can be stochastic, and drastic changes of traffic demands may trigger slice reconfiguration. In this paper, we investigate robust network slicing mechanisms by addressing the slice recovery and reconfiguration in a unified framework. We first develop an optimal slice recovery mechanism for deterministic traffic demands. This optimal solution is used as a benchmark for evaluating other robust slicing algorithms. Then, we design an optimal joint slice recovery and reconfiguration algorithm for stochastic traffic demands by exploiting robust optimization. To tackle the slow convergence issue in the robust optimization algorithm, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on variable neighborhood search. Numerical results reveal that our proposed robust network slicing algorithms can provide adjustable tolerance of traffic uncertainties compared with the deterministic algorithm.
AB - Network slicing is a fundamental architectural technology for the fifth generation mobile network. It is challenging to design a robust end-to-end network slice spanning overall networks, where a slice is constituted by a set of virtual network functions (VNFs) and links. Bugs may accidentally occur in some VNFs, invalidating some slices, and triggering slice recovery processes. Besides, the traffic demands in each slice can be stochastic, and drastic changes of traffic demands may trigger slice reconfiguration. In this paper, we investigate robust network slicing mechanisms by addressing the slice recovery and reconfiguration in a unified framework. We first develop an optimal slice recovery mechanism for deterministic traffic demands. This optimal solution is used as a benchmark for evaluating other robust slicing algorithms. Then, we design an optimal joint slice recovery and reconfiguration algorithm for stochastic traffic demands by exploiting robust optimization. To tackle the slow convergence issue in the robust optimization algorithm, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on variable neighborhood search. Numerical results reveal that our proposed robust network slicing algorithms can provide adjustable tolerance of traffic uncertainties compared with the deterministic algorithm.
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U2 - 10.1109/TCOMM.2018.2868652
DO - 10.1109/TCOMM.2018.2868652
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85052871792
SN - 0090-6778
VL - 67
SP - 430
EP - 444
JO - IEEE Transactions on Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 8454739
ER -