Elastic Network Slice Composition with Traffic-Weighted Availability-Guarantee

Network slicing has helped in advancing the types of applications that could be supported by next-generation telecommunication networks. This is achieved by hosting Service Function Chains (SFCs) over the network slices that satisfy user demand. With that in mind, we have considered the problem of the composition of elastic network slices on physical infrastructures such that the availability requirements of the SFCs are satisfied. Instead of traditional availability, we utilize the concept of traffic-weighted availability to satisfy the SFC demands. We present a linear programming model to calculate the provisioning of the bandwidth resources over the slice paths while minimizing the total cost of provisioning. Our simulation results show that the approach in this work is effective when compared to the well-known dedicated protection mechanism.