Time-Varying Real-Time Online Multi-Resource Allocation for Scaling the Slices and VNF Isolation

The infrastructure of mobile networks in 5G will offer various services in the form of network slices that can be deployed and implemented in a highly customizable manner. A real dynamic network with time-varying network utility has not been considered in previous works. In this paper, we examine the multi-resource allocation problem for network slicing in an online manner where the utility functions change over time. To solve the problems as mentioned above, we present Metis, a first systematic solution. Metis is an online network slice resource allocation framework that combines the time-varying property of the network utility function given the bandwidth and processing capacity constraints with the virtual network functions isolation requirements. As a result, we aim to maximize the cumulative network utility over time. Utilizing state-of-the-art concave optimization methods, we formulate the multi-resource allocation problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work investigating an online method for multi-resources allocation for network slicing in a real-time network. Metis can proveably converge to the optimal solution, and the experiment results show a steady state behavior for Metis which converges in dynamic network settings.