An Online Multi-dimensional Knapsack Approach for Slice Admission Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online admission control method for network slices modeled as a multidimensional knapsack problem, improving revenue and resource utilization in shared mobile networks.

Contribution

It proposes reservation-based online policies for slice admission control that outperform traditional greedy approaches in revenue and efficiency.

Findings

Revenues increased by up to 12.9% with the new policies.

Resource consumption was reduced by up to 1.7%.

Performance gains are more significant with higher tenant economic inequality.

Abstract

Network Slicing has emerged as a powerful technique to enable cost-effective, multi-tenant communications and services over a shared physical mobile network infrastructure. One major challenge of service provisioning in slice-enabled networks is the uncertainty in the demand for the limited network resources that must be shared among existing slices and potentially new Network Slice Requests. In this paper, we consider admission control of Network Slice Requests in an online setting, with the goal of maximizing the long-term revenue received from admitted requests. We model the Slice Admission Control problem as an Online Multidimensional Knapsack Problem and present two reservation-based policies and their algorithms, which have a competitive performance for Online Multidimensional Knapsack Problems. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we evaluate the performance of our online admission control method in terms of average revenue gained by the Infrastructure Provider, system resource utilization, and the ratio of accepted slice requests. We compare our approach with those of the online First Come First Serve greedy policy. The simulation's results prove that our proposed online policies increase revenues for Infrastructure Providers by up to 12.9 % while reducing the average resource consumption by up to 1.7% In particular, when the tenants' economic inequality increases, an Infrastructure Provider who adopts our proposed online admission policies gains higher revenues compared to an Infrastructure Provider who adopts First Come First Serve.