Network slicing remains one of the key technologies in 5G and beyond 5G networks (B5G). By leveraging SDN and NVF techniques, it enables the coexistence of several heterogeneous virtual networks (VNs) on top of the same physical infrastructure. Despite the advantages it brings to network operators, network slicing raises a major challenge: Resource allocation of VNs, also known as the virtual network embedding problem (VNEP). VNEP is known to be an NP-Hard problem. Several heuristics, meta-heuristics and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based solutions were proposed in the literature to solve it. Regarding the first two categories, they can provide a solution for large scale problems within a reasonable time, but the solution is usually suboptimal, which leads to an inefficient utilization of the resources and increases the cost of the allocation process. For DRL-based approaches and due to the explorationexploitation dilemma, the solution can be infeasible. To overcome these issues, we combine, in this work, deep reinforcement learning and relational graph convolutional neural networks in order to automatically learn how to improve the quality of VNEP heuristics. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our approach. Starting with an initial solution given by the heuristics our approach can find an amelioration, with an improvement in the order of 35%.
Resource allocation of 5G network slices is one of the most important challenges for network operators. It can be formulated using the Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) problem, which was and remains an active field of studies, also known because of its NP-hardness. Owing to its complexity, several heuristics, meta-heuristics and Deep Learning-based solutions have been proposed. However, these solutions are inefficient either due to their slowness or to not taking into account the structure of data which results in an inefficient exploration of the solutions space. To overcome these issues, in this work we unveil the potential of Graph Convolutional Neural (GCN) networks and Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques in solving the VNE problem. The key point of our approach is modeling of the VNE problem as an episodic Markov Decision Process which is solved in a Reinforcement Learning fashion using a GCNbased neural architecture. The simulation results highlight the efficiency of our approach through an increased performance over time, while outperforming state-of-art solutions in terms of the services' acceptance ratio.
Network Slicing (NS) is a key technology that enables network operators to accommodate different types of services with varying needs on a single physical infrastructure. Despite the advantages it brings, NS raises some technical challenges, mainly ensuring the Service Level Agreements (SLA) for each slice. Hence, monitoring the state of these slices will be a priority for ISPs. However, due to the high measurements overhead, it is generally forbidden to directly measure the performance of all of these slices. To overcome this limitation, network tomography is a promising solution, consisting of a set of methods of inferring unmeasured network metrics using end-to-end measurements between monitors. In this work, we focus on inferring the additive metrics of slices such as delays or logarithms of loss rates. We model the inference task as a regression problem that we solve using neural networks. In our approach, we train the model on an artificial dataset. This not only avoids the costly process of collecting a large set of labeled data but has also a nice covering property useful for the procedure's accuracy. Moreover, to handle a change on the topology or the slices we monitor, we propose a solution based on transfer learning in order to find a trade-off between the quality of the solution and the cost to get it. Simulation results with both, emulated and simulated traffic show the efficiency of our method compared to existing ones in terms of both accuracy and computation time.
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