How should I slice my network? A multi-service empirical evaluation of resource sharing efficiency

Abstract

By providing especially tailored instances of a virtual network,network slicing allows for a strong specialization of the offered services on the same shared infrastructure. Network slicing has profound implications on resource management, as it entails an inherent trade-off between: (i) the need for fully dedicated resources to support service customization, and (ii) the dynamic resource sharing among services to increase resource efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the system. In this paper, we provide a first investigation of this trade-off via an empirical study of resource management efficiency in network slicing. Building on substantial measurement data collected in an operational mobile network (i) we quantify the efficiency gap introduced by non-reconfigurable allocation strategies of different kinds of resources, from radio access to the core of the network, and (ii) we quantify the advantages of their dynamic orchestration at different timescales. Our results provide insights on the achievable efficiency of network slicing architectures, their dimensioning, and their interplay with resource management algorithms.