A Formal Optimization Model for 5G Mobile Network Slice Resource Allocation

Network slicing is one of the key features of 5G mobile networks to cope with the diverging network requirements introduced by new use cases, like the IoT, autonomous driving and the Industry of the Future. Network slices are isolated, virtualized, end-to-end networks optimized for specific use cases. But still they share a common physical network infrastructure. Due to the dynamic life cycle of network slices there is a strong demand on efficient algorithms for mobile end-to-end network slice embedding. In this paper, a mathematical model for solving the offline Network Slice Embedding Problem formalized as a standardized Mixed Integer Linear Program is presented. A latency sensitive objective function guarantees the optimal network utilization as well as minimum latency in the network slice communication.