Fine-grained function deployment and routing of RAN slicing with function reuse scheme in metro-aggregation elastic...

Area of Science:

• Telecommunications Engineering
• Network Resource Management
• Optical Networking

Background:

• Function reuse in network function virtualization (NFV) improves resource efficiency but can increase processing and transport delays.
• Coordinating function reuse with delay constraints is critical for service quality in network slicing.
• Metro-aggregation elastic optical networks (EONs) require efficient deployment strategies for diverse service demands.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate fine-grained function deployment and routing for radio access network (RAN) slicing within EONs.
• To develop a method for coordinating function reuse and transport delay to maximize resource utilization.
• To ensure that the delay requirements of individual RAN service requests are met.

Main Methods:

• Formulation of the problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) model for an exact solution.
• Development of a longest common subsequence-based algorithm to address ILP scalability issues and find near-optimal solutions.
• Extensive numerical simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.

Main Results:

• The ILP model effectively minimizes computing and bandwidth resource consumption for optimal RAN deployment.
• The longest common subsequence-based algorithm provides a scalable approach to near-optimal RAN deployment.
• The proposed algorithm demonstrates high utilization of computing and bandwidth resources.

Conclusions:

• The developed algorithm successfully balances function reuse and transport delay in RAN slicing over EONs.
• High resource utilization is achieved while adhering to strict service delay requirements.
• The findings contribute to efficient and performant network slicing solutions in optical networks.