Online Multi-Resource Allocation for Network Slicing in 5G with Distributed Algorithms

Abstract

With the increasing scale of mobile cellular network applications, 5G mobile network infrastructure provides customizable services to users in the form of network slices. How to effectively allocate existing resources in real dynamic networks with time-varying network utility is a key issue that previous work did not consider. This paper first initializes the multi-resource allocation problem of network slicing in an online manner, where the utility function is set to change over time. Therefore, we propose Metis, an online network slicing resource allocation framework that combines the time-varying nature of the network utility function given bandwidth and processing power constraints with the requirement of virtual network function isolation. The goal is to maximize the cumulative network utility in the long term and specify multiple resource allocation problems by utilizing concave optimization methods. In addition, a distributed algorithm based on the online alternating direction method of multipliers with regret optimization has been developed to achieve optimal resource allocation. Our mathematical analysis proves that Metis can provably converge to the optimal solution and the result of experiments demonstrates a steady state behavior of Metis, which converges in dynamic network settings.