An End-to-End Performance Analysis for Service Chaining in a Virtualized Network

Future mobile networks supporting Internet of Things are expected to provide both high throughput and low latency to user-specific services. One way to overcome this challenge is to adopt Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Besides latency constraints, these services may have strict function chaining requirements. The distribution of network functions over different hosts and more flexible routing caused by service function chaining raise new challenges for end-to-end performance analysis. In this paper, as a first step, we analyze an end-to-end communications system that consists of both MEC servers and a server at the core network hosting different types of virtual network functions. We develop a queueing model for the performance analysis of the system consisting of both processing and transmission flows. We propose a method in order to derive analytical expressions of the performance metrics of interest. Then, we show how to apply the similar method to an extended larger system and derive a stochastic model for such systems. We observe that the simulation and analytical results coincide. By evaluating the system under different scenarios, we provide insights for the decision making on traffic flow control and its impact on critical performance metrics.Comment: 30 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1811.0233

A Graph Neural Network-based Digital Twin for Network Slicing Management

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordNetwork slicing has emerged as a promising networking paradigm to provide resources tailored for Industry 4.0 and diverse services in 5G networks. However, the increased network complexity poses a huge challenge in network management due to virtualised infrastructure and stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Digital twin (DT) technology paves a way for achieving cost-efficient and performance-optimal management, through creating a virtual representation of slicing-enabled networks digitally to simulate its behaviours and predict the time-varying performance. In this paper, a scalable DT of network slicing is developed, aiming to capture the intertwined relationships among slices and monitor the end-to-end (E2E) metrics of slices under diverse network environments. The proposed DT exploits the novel Graph Neural Network model that can learn insights directly from slice-enabled networks represented by non-Euclidean graph structures. Experimental results show that the DT can accurately mirror the network behaviour and predict E2E latency under various topologies and unseen environments.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC