Dynamic slicing approach for multi-tenant 5G transport networks [invited]

Software defined networking allows network providers to share their physical network (PN) among multiple tenants by means of network slicing, where several virtual networks (VNs) are provisioned on top of the physical one. In this scenario, PN resource utilization can be improved by introducing advanced orchestration functionalities that can intelligently assign and redistribute resources among the slices of different tenants according to the temporal variation of the VN resource requirements. This is a concept known as dynamic slicing. This paper presents a solution for the dynamic slicing problem in terms of both mixed integer linear programming formulations and heuristic algorithms. The benefits of dynamic slicing are compared against static slicing, i.e., an approach without intelligent adaptation of the amount of resources allocated to each VN. Simulation results show that dynamic slicing can reduce the VN rejection probability by more than 1 order of magnitude compared to static slicing. This can help network providers accept more VNs into their infrastructure and potentially increase their revenues. The benefits of dynamic slicing come at a cost in terms of service degradation (i.e., when not all the resources required by a VN can be provided), but the paper shows that the service degradation level introduced by the proposed solutions is very small.