Service Chain Embedding for Diversified 5G Slices

With Virtual Network Function Sharing

Manohar Reddy Mulle, Abhijith Pogiri,

Harshal Gawai
 Outline

● Introduction
● Sharable, non-Sharable VNF
● Network Slicing
● Problem Statement
● Constants
● Variables
● Solution
● Constraints
❏ Introduction

A Flow:
Any flow is defined completely by its source,
destination, amount of bandwidth required, slice type and
maximum delay.
VNF:
Any functionality in the network that process data
packets between source and destination in a flow. These
are virtual which means we can instantiate a VM and install
the corresponding functionality.

Eg: NAT, Firewall, load balancer etc.

 Sharable, Non-Sharable VNFs

Sharable VNFs:
These VNFs can be shared across slices.
Eg: NAT

non-Sharble VNFs:
These VNFs can not be shared across slices.
Eg: Firewall
Service Chain:
Set of VNFs which serves a particular flow. Service
Chain is defined by the set of VNFs it will use and the
edges between them.
Slice:
A slice serves a set of flows which originate from
different end users who have similar Quality of Service
requirements .
 What is Network slicing?

● It’s a way to structure a network to support several classes of

services in a guaranteed way on the same network.

● Using this technique, mobile network operators can slice their

physical networks into portions which can be assigned to
individual companies for their dedicated use.
 Why Network slicing?

● It offers isolation between slices in a physical network

architecture.

● End users can request for specific services like low latency or
high bandwidth etc.

● It increases security.
According to International Telecommunication Union, there are
generally 3 classes of 5G slices.

● Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB)

● Ultra-reliable and Low-latency Communications (URLLC)
● Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC)
 ❏ PROBLEM STATEMENT

➢ Given a source, destination and type of slice, we have to find a

path between source and destination with the corresponding
slice's VNFs installed in between, thus forming a service chain.

➢ The path should minimize both total bandwidth consumed and

the total number of VNFS required.

➢ There's trade-off between total bandwidth consumed and the

total number of VNFs required.
★ Finding a shortest path between a souce and destination is not
enough for finding solution to the problem as there may exist
an another path which uses sharable VNFs, thus reducing the
number of VNFs required.
● In order to effectively solve the problem, we need to solve the
following sub-problems.

○ VNF placement
○ Traffic routing
○ Resource allocation
➢ We need to define an objective function to minimize the total
bandwidth consumed and the total number of VNFs required
while satisfying some constraints.
The constraints are:-

(a) VNF Instantiation Constraints

(b) Latency Constraints for URLLC slice
(c) Capacity Constraint for a Physical Node
(d) Processing Constraint for a VNF
(e) Bandwidth Constraints
(f) Flow Conservation Constraints of Physical Paths
(g) VNF chaining constraints
 Constants

G(V,E) Here V is the set of physical nodes and E is the set of

physical edges.
Cu The computational resource capacity of node u belongs
to V.
δ(u) The set of neighboring nodes of node u.
B The total capacity of each link in the network.
Be The residual bandwidth of an edge e.
Nf A set of VNFs.
Bf Residual bandwidth of the flow f .
F A set of flows.
ai VNF i is sharable or not.
Pi Processing capacity of VNF i.
Mi u Maximum number of VNF instances of i that can be
present in node u.
Ci Computational resource required by the VNF i.
Δi Per-unit computational resource requirement of VNF i.
Ef A set of all virtual edges in a flow.
 Variables

Xf,iu VNF i is present in physical node u or not for flow

f.
Activei,ju VNF i’s jth instance is active or not in physical node
u.
Pf,e2e1 physical edge e1 is serving virtual edge e2 in flow f
or not.
Zf,i,ju VNF i’s jth instance is active or not in physical node
u for flow f.
 ❏ SOLUTION

Objective function:

Minimize:
❏ Constraints

(a) VNF Instantiation Constraints:

(b) Latency Constraints for URLLC slice:

(c) Capacity Constraint for a Physical Node:

(d) Processing Constraint for a VNF:

(e) Bandwidth Constraints:

(f) Flow Conservation Constraints of Physical Paths:
(g) VNF chaining constraints: