IEEE Project Abstract

Network slicing enables diversified services to be accommodated by isolated slices in NFV-enabled software-defined networks. To maintain satisfactory user experience and high profit for service providers in a dynamic environment, a slice may need to be reconfigured according to the varying traffic demand and resource availability. However, frequent re configurations incur certain cost and might cause service interruption. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Slice Reconfiguration (HSR)framework, where a Fast Slice Reconfiguration (FSR) scheme re configures flows for individual slices at the time scale of flow arrival/departure, while a Dimensioning Slices with Reconfiguration(DSR) scheme is occasionally performed to adjust allocated resources according to the time-varying traffic demand. In order to optimize the slice’s profit, i.e., the total utility minus there source consumption and reconfiguration cost, we formulate the problems for FSR and DSR, which are difficult to solve due to the discontinuity and non-convexity of the re configuration cost function. Hence, we approximate the reconfiguration cost function with L1 norm, which preserves the sparsity of the solution, thus facilitating restricting re configurations. Besides, we design an algorithm to schedule FSR and DSR, so that DSR is timely triggered according to the traffic dynamics and resource availability to improve the profit of slice. Furthermore, weextend HSR with a resource reservation (HSR-RSV) mechanism,which reserves partial resources for near future traffic to reduce potential re configurations. Numerical results validate that our re configuration framework is effective in reducing reconfiguration overhead and achieving high profit for slices.