Minimizing the Cost of 5G Network Slice Broker

Network slicing is a key enabler of the fifth-generation (5G) of mobile networks. It allows creating multiple logical networks, i.e. network slices, with heterogeneous requirements over a common underlying infrastructure. The underlying infrastructure is composed of heterogeneous resources, such as network and computational resources. These resources are owned and managed by various Infrastructure Providers (InPs). In network slicing, a new actor, called Slice Broker (SB), purchases resources from the various InPs to create the network slices. In this paper, we address the problem of the allocation of network slices. Our target is to minimize the total cost of SB to acquire the resources from the InPs. The contributions are the following: (i) we define the addressed problem; (ii) we propose a heuristic solution to the problem; (iii) we evaluate the behavior of the proposed heuristic in various scenarios, and we compare it with a benchmark solution. The results show that a cost reduction from 60% to 80% is possible in all scenarios investigated.