Slicing Virtualized EPC-based 5G Core Network for Content Delivery

TL;DR

This paper proposes a resource allocation method for slicing virtualized 5G EPC networks to support both ICN-based and traditional CDNs, aiming to optimize costs while ensuring QoS.

Contribution

It introduces an ILP-based approach for efficient 5G network slicing tailored for content delivery, addressing the coexistence of ICN and traditional CDNs.

Findings

ILP formulation effectively minimizes slice assignment costs.

The approach meets QoS requirements in small-scale scenarios.

Supports coexistence of ICN and traditional CDNs in 5G slices.

Abstract

Traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) built with traditional Internet technology are less and less able to cope with today's tremendous growth of content. Information Centric Networks (ICN), a proposed future Internet technology, may aid in remedying the situation. Unlike the current Internet, it decouples information from its sources and provides in-network storage. We expect traditional CDN and ICN-based CDN to co-exist in the foreseeable future, especially as it is now known that it might be possible to evolve traditional CDNs to gain the benefits promised by ICN. 5G providers must therefore aim to offer core network slices on which both ICN-based CDNs and traditional CDNs can be built. These slices could of course also be offered to providers of other applications with requirements similar to those of content delivery. This paper tackles the problem of slicing 5G for content delivery over ICN-based CDNs and traditional CDNs. Only virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC)-based 5G is considered. The problem is defined as a resource allocation problem which aims at minimizing the cost of slice assignment, while meeting QoS requirements. An Integer linear programming (ILP) formulation is provided and evaluated in a small-scale scenario.