Capacity Planning for Virtual Resource Management in Network Slicing

Abstract

Network slicing is envisioned as one of the core enablers for 5G. It empowers service providers to multiplex their physical infrastructure over multiple logical networks. Slice orchestration performs lifecycle management and virtual resource management of a network slice. Slice capacity planning, one of the key responsibilities of slice orchestration faces two major challenges: (i) minimum slice capacity estimation for a given slice configuration, and (ii) lack of simple network slicing supported open source solutions due to which the research and development of slice resource orchestration activities are hit adversely. The feature-rich existing solutions have significantly high learning curve. This paper addresses these two issues. We present a probabilistic model for slice capacity planning and propose a simple orchestration-centric discrete event simulator to develop and evaluate minimum slice capacity requirement. The results taken on our custom simulator show around 96% of resource utilization, and have less than 5% relative error when compared with the theoretical model.