A Heuristically Assisted Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Network Slice Placement

Network Slice placement with the problem of allocation of resources from a virtualized substrate network is an optimization problem which can be formulated as a multi-objective Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. However, to cope with the complexity of such a continuous task and seeking for optimality and automation, the use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques appear as a promising approach. We introduce a hybrid placement solution based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and a dedicated optimization heuristic based on the “Power of Two Choices” principle. The DRL algorithm uses the so-called Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) algorithm for fast learning, and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) to automate feature extraction from the physical substrate network. The proposed Heuristically-Assisted DRL (HA-DRL) allows for the acceleration of the learning process and substantial gain in resource usage when compared against other state-of-the-art approaches, as evidenced by evaluation results.