Abstract

With network slicing, physical networks are partitioned into multiple virtual networks tailored to serve different types of service with their specific requirements. In order to optimize the utilization of network resources for delay-critical applications, we propose a new multi-domain network virtualization framework based on a novel multipath multihop delay model. This framework encompasses a novel hierarchical orchestration mechanism for mapping network slices onto physical resources and a mechanism for dynamic slice resizing. The main idea is to locally redefine the delay requirements on each network domain depending on the conditions in the rest of the network. Delays larger than threshold (debt) are allowed in certain domains if there is a possibility to compensate such excessive delays in other segments of the network that can transmit the messages with less latency (credit). This tradeoff or delay threshold redefinition on different segments of the route is referred to as network latency equalization. For performance comparison, minimum cost routing with latency constraints is used as a baseline. We show that our approach enables significantly better utilization of the network resources measured in the number of slices with the same latency requirements that can be accommodated in the network.