Network slice embedding under traffic uncertainties — A light robust approach

Abstract

5G networks are conceived to be highly flexible and programmable end-to-end connect-and-compute infrastructures. In that context, the concept of network slicing is of particular importance [1]. From a network infrastructure point of view, network slicing refers to the provisioning and assignment of physical substrate network resources to tenants. To enable an efficient resource allocation, suitable optimization models are required. In our previous contributions [2], we presented a model that takes into account traffic uncertainty by using the well known concept of Γ-robustness. We further extended this model to cope with general network slices and to consider also single substrate link and node failures [3]. In this paper, we present a novel model applying the concept of light robustness [4] [5] to address scalability issues of our previous models and to get a deeper insight into the tradeoff between the price of robustness and the realized robustness. We compare our model with a nominal and Γ-robust approach for different scenarios using network topology examples from SNDlib [6].