InterS: Towards Inter-Slice Bandwidth Resource Sharing

A network slice (NS) is an isolated end-to-end (E2E) virtual and logical network created upon a customer request to fulfil the diverse requirements of a specific business use case. A fundamental issue in network slicing is the efficient share of the underlying physical network resources between network slices. This paper presents a proof of concept (PoC) of the inter-slice bandwidth resources sharing approach initially introduced by the IETF COMS information model. To the best of our knowledge, our PoC, so-called InterS, is the first to implement the data model and evaluate the performance of the concept via realistic intensive experiments in a Software Defined Network (SDN). Thus, InterS allows a congested NS to acquire temporary the free bandwidth resources of a neighbor slice and use them to serve its own traffic. Experiments have shown that InterS can significantly improves the operator's network bandwidth usage as well as the flow acceptance rates under some specific network conditions.