Network slicing appears as a key enabler for the future 5G networks. Mobile Network Operators create various slices for Service Providers (SP) to accommodate customized services. As network slices are operated on a common network infrastructure owned by some Infrastructure Provider (InP), sharing the resources across a set of network slices is important for future deployment. Moreover, in many situations, slices have to be deployed over some geographical area: coverage as well as minimum per-user rate constraints have then to be taken into account. Usually, the various Service Function Chains (SFCs) belonging to a slice are deployed on a best-effort basis. Nothing ensures that the InP will be able to allocate enough resources to cope with the increasing demands of some SP. This paper takes the InP perspective and proposes a slice resource provisioning approach to cope with multiple slice demands in terms of computing, storage, coverage, and rate constraints. The resource requirements of the various Service Function Chains to be deployed within a slice are aggregated within a graph of Slice Resource Demands (SRD). Coverage and rate constraints are also taken into account in the SRD. Infrastructure nodes and links have then to be provisioned so as to satisfy all types of resource demands. This problem leads to a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation. A two-step deployment approach is considered, with several variants, depending on whether the constraints of each slide to be deployed are taken into account sequentially or jointly. Once provisioning has been performed, any slice deployment strategy may be considered on the reduced-size infrastructure graph representing the nodes and links on which resources have been provisioned. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to a more classical direct slice embedding approach.
In this work, we assume that the resource requirements for the various SFCs that will have to be deployed within a slice may be aggregated and represented by a Slice Resource Demand (SRD) graph that mimics the graph of SFCs. These SRDs are evaluated by the MNO to satisfy the QoS requirements imposed by the tenant. The InP has then to provision enough infrastructure resources to meet the SLA. Due to the fact that nodes or links of the graph of SRDs represent aggregate requirements, several infrastructure nodes may have to be gathered and parallel physical links have to be considered to satisfy the various SRDs. This is the main difference with respect to the traditional service chain embedding approach considered for example in @cite_14 @cite_0 , where each VNF is deployed on a single node. In @cite_14 @cite_0 , virtual nodes and links are mapped on the infrastructure network to allocate resources to VNFs and virtual links. In this paper, one provisions a sufficient number of infrastructure nodes and links, so that the aggregated provisioned resources meet the slice demands represented by the graph of SRDs.
@cite_0 @cite_14
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Network slicing has recently appeared as a key enabler for the future 5G networks where Mobile Network Operators (MNO) create various slices for Service Providers (SP) to accommodate customized services. As network slices are operated on a common network infrastructure owned by some Infrastructure Provider (InP), sharing the resources across a set of network slices is highly important for future deployment. In this paper, taking the InP perspective, we propose an optimization framework for slice resource provisioning addressing multiple slice demands in terms of computing, storage, and wireless capacity. We assume that the aggregated resource requirements of the various Service Function Chains to be deployed within a slice may be represented by a graph of slice resource demands. Infrastructure nodes and links have then to be provisioned so as to satisfy these resource demands. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation is considered to address this problem. A realistic use case of slices deployment over a mobile access network is then considered. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for network slice provisioning. A key challenge in network virtualization is to efficiently map a virtual network (VN) on a substrate network (SN), while accounting for possible substrate failures. This is known as the survivable VN embedding (SVNE) problem. The state-of-the-art literature has studied the SVNE problem from infrastructure providers’ (InPs’) perspective, i.e., provisioning backup resources in the SN. A rather unexplored solution spectrum is to augment the VN with sufficient spare backup capacity to survive substrate failures and embed the resulting VN accordingly. Such augmentation enables InPs to offload failure recovery decisions to the VN operator, thus providing more flexible VN management. In this paper, we study the problem of jointly optimizing spare capacity allocation in a VN and embedding the VN to guarantee full bandwidth in the presence of multiple substrate link failures. We formulate the optimal solution to this problem as a quadratic integer program that we transform into an integer linear program. We also propose a heuristic algorithm to solve larger instances of the problem. Based on analytical study and simulation, our key findings are: 1) provisioning shared backup resources in the VN can yield 33 more resource efficient embedding compared to doing the same at the SN level and 2) our heuristic allocates 21 extra resources compared to the optimal, while executing several orders of magnitude faster. Network function (NF) virtualization decouples NFs from the underlying middlebox hardware and promotes their deployment on virtualized network infrastructures. This essentially paves the way for the migration of NFs into clouds (i.e., NF-as-a-Service), achieving a drastic reduction of middlebox investment and operational costs for enterprises. In this context, service chains (expressing middlebox policies in the enterprise network) should be mapped onto datacenter networks, ensuring correctness, resource efficiency, as well as compliance with the provider’s policy. The network service embedding (NSE) problem is further exacerbated by two challenging aspects: 1) traffic scaling caused by certain NFs (e.g., caches and WAN optimizers) and 2) NF location dependencies. Traffic scaling requires resource reservations different from the ones specified in the service chain, whereas NF location dependencies, in conjunction with the limited geographic footprint of NF providers (NFPs), raise the need for NSE across multiple NFPs. In this paper, we present a holistic solution to the multi-provider NSE problem. We decompose NSE into: 1) NF-graph partitioning performed by a centralized coordinator and 2) NF-subgraph mapping onto datacenter networks. We present linear programming formulations to derive near-optimal solutions for both problems. We address the challenging aspect of traffic scaling by introducing a new service model that supports demand transformations. We also define topology abstractions for NF-graph partitioning. Furthermore, we discuss the steps required to embed service chains across multiple NFPs, using our NSE orchestrator (Nestor). We perform an evaluation study of multi-provider NSE with emphasis on NF-graph partitioning optimizations tailored to the client and NFPs. Our evaluation results further uncover significant savings in terms of service cost and resource consumption due to the demand transformations. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized service provisioning in cloud datacenter networks. It enables the complete decoupling of Network Functions (NFs) from the physical hardware middle boxes that network operators deploy for implementing service-specific and strictly ordered NF chains. Precisely, NFV allows for dispatching NFs as instances of plain software called virtual network functions (VNFs) running on virtual machines hosted by one or more industry standard physical machines. Nevertheless, NF softwarization introduces processing vulnerability ( e.g. , failures caused by hardware or software, and so on). Since any failure of VNFs could break down an entire service chain, thus interrupting the service, the functionality of an NFV-enabled network will require a higher reliability compared with traditional networks. This paper encloses an in-depth investigation of a reliability-aware joint VNF chain placement and flow routing optimization. In order to guarantee the required reliability, an incremental approach is proposed to determine the number of required VNF backups. Through illustration, it is shown herein that the formulated single path routing model can be easily extended to support resource sharing between adjacent backup VNF instances. This paper advocates the absolute existence of a share-resource-based VNF assignment strategy that is capable of trading off all of the reliability, bandwidth, and computing resources consumption of a given service chain. A heuristic is proposed to work around the complexity of the presently formulated integer linear programming (ILP). Thorough numerical analysis and simulations are conducted in order to verify and assert the validity, correctness, and effectiveness of this proposed heuristic reflecting its ability to achieve very close results to those obtained through the resolution of the complex ILP within a negligible amount of time. Above and beyond, the proposed resource-sharing-based VNF placement scheme outperforms existing resource-sharing agnostic schemes by 15.6 and 14.7 in terms of bandwidth and CPU utilization respectively.