Network Slice Selection in Softwarization Based Mobile Networks

Recently network slicing has been introduced as a key enabler to accommodate diversified services in NFV- enabled software-defined mobile networks. Although there has been some research work on network slice deployment and configuration, how user equipments (UEs) select the most appropriate network slice is still an essential yet challenging issue, as slice selection may substantially affect the resource utilization and user quality of service. In this paper, we investigate the optimal selection of end-to-end slices with aim of improving network resources utilization while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) of users. We formulate the optimal slice selection problem as maximizing the users' satisfaction degree, and prove it is NP-hard. We thus resort to genetic algorithm (GA) to find a sub-optimal solution, and develop a heuristic algorithm based on GA algorithm. The effectiveness of our proposed NS selection algorithm is validated via simulation experiments.