Scheduling of Low Latency Services in Softwarized Networks

The fifth generation (5G) networks are expected to support diverse business verticals (i.e., manufacturing, health care, etc.) with varying quality of service requirements. While today’s mobile networks are a one size fits all architecture, tomorrow’s 5G mobile networks are envisioned to encourage agility, programmability and elasticity through enabling a software-based architecture promoted by network slicing. Network slicing is a new paradigm consisting of partitioning the underlying network infrastructure into different logical network slices, each dedicated to address the requirements (i.e., ultra-low latency, ultra-reliability, etc.) of a group of services. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies have been identified as main enablers of network slicing, facilitating the fulfillment of the aforementioned services’ requirements. In this paper, we study the Latency-Aware service scheduling (LASS) problem to solve the network function mapping, the traffic routing and the network service scheduling in the context of an ultra-low latency network slice to consider services with stringent deadlines. We propose the LASS-Game, a novel game-theoretic approach presenting a scalable solution for the LASS problem that accounts for the centralized aspect of the problem while leveraging a decentralized mapping, routing and scheduling decisions.