Multi-Site Resource Allocation in a QoS-Aware 5G Infrastructure

Network softwarization has paved the way for 5G technologies, and a wide-range of (radically new) verticals. As the telecommunications infrastructure evolves into a sort of distributed datacenter, multiple tenants such as vertical industries and network service providers share its aggregate pool of resources (e.g., networking, computing, etc.) in a layered “as-a-Service” approach exposed as slice abstractions. The challenge remains in the coordination of various stakeholders’ assets in realizing end-to-end network slices and supporting the multi-site deployment and chaining of the micro-service components needed to implement cloud-native vertical applications (vApps). In this context, particular care must be taken to ensure that the required resources are identified, made available and managed in a way that satisfies the vApp requirements, allows for a fair share of resources and has a reasonable impact on the overall vApp deployment time. With these challenges in mind, this paper presents the Resource Selection Optimizer (RSO)– a software-service in the MATILDA Operations Support System (OSS), whose main goal is to select the most appropriate network and computing resources (according to some criterion) among a list of options provided by the Wide-area Infrastructure Manager (WIM). It consists of three submodules that respectively handle: (i) the aggregation of vApp components based on affinities, (ii) the forecasting of (micro-) datacenter resources utilization, (iii) and the multi-site placement of the (aggregated) vApp micro-service components. The RSO’s performance is mainly evaluated in terms of the execution times of its submodules while varying their respective input parameters, and additionally, three selection policies are also compared. Experimental results aim to highlight the RSO behavior in both execution times and deployment costs, as well as the RSO interactions with other OSS submodules and network platform components, not only for multi-site vApp deployment but also for other network/services management operations.