QoS-Aware and Routing-Flexible Network Slicing for Service-Oriented Networks

In this paper, we consider the network slicing () problem which aims to map multiple customized virtual network requests (also called services) to a common shared network infrastructure and manage network resources to meet diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. We propose a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) formulation for the considered NS problem that can flexibly route the traffic flow of the services on multiple paths and provide end-to-end delay and reliability guarantees for all services. To overcome the computational difficulty due to the intrinsic nonlinearity in the MINLP formulation, we transform the formulation into an equivalent mixed-integer linear programming () formulation and further show that their continuous relaxations are equivalent. In sharp contrast to the continuous relaxation of the formulation which is a nonconvex nonlinear programming problem, the continuous relaxation of the formulation is a polynomial-time solvable linear programming problem, which significantly facilitates the algorithmic design. Based on the newly proposed formulation, we develop a customized column generation () algorithm for solving the problem. The proposed algorithm is a decomposition-based algorithm and is particularly suitable for solving large-scale problems. Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed formulations and the proposed algorithm.