Reliable Slicing of 5G Transport Networks with Dedicated Protection

In 5G networks, slicing allows partitioning of network resources to meet stringent end-to-end service requirements across multiple network segments, from access to transport. These requirements are shaping technical evolution in each of these segments. In particular, the transport segment is currently evolving in the direction of the so-called elastic optical networks (EONs), a new generation of optical networks supporting a flexible optical-spectrum grid and novel elastic transponder capabilities. In this paper, we focus on the reliability of 5G transport-network slices in EON. Specifically, we consider the problem of slicing 5G transport networks, i.e., establishing virtual networks on 5G transport, while providing dedicated protection. As dedicated protection requires large amount of backup resources, our proposed solution incorporates two techniques to reduce backup resources: (i) bandwidth squeezing, i.e., providing a reduced protection bandwidth with respect to the original request; and (ii) survivable multi-path provisioning. We leverage the capability of EONs to fine tune spectrum allocation and adapt modulation format and Forward Error Correction (FEC) for allocating rightsize spectrum resources to network slices. Our numerical evaluation over realistic case-study network topologies quantifies the spectrum savings achieved by employing EON over traditional fixed-grid optical networks, and provides new insights on the impact of bandwidth squeezing and multi-path provisioning on spectrum utilization

Research on Survivability Strategies of Virtual Network

Virtualization facilitates heterogeneous cloud applications to share the same physical infrastructure with admirable flexibility, while resource efficiency and survivability are critical concerns for virtual network embedding (VNE). As more and more internet applications migrate to the cloud, the resource efficiency and the survivability of VNs, such as single link failure or large-scale disaster survivability, have become crucial issues. Separating the VNE problem into node and link mapping sub-problems without coordination might cause a high embedding cost. This dissertation presents two independent approaches to solve the aforementioned challenges. First, we study two-stage coordinated survivable VNE (SVNE) problem and propose an adaptive path splitting based SVNE (APSS) scheme. We first develop a concise anchor node strategy to restrict the solution space of the candidate substrate nodes, which coordinates node mapping with link mapping to limit the distance spans of the virtual links. Then, we employ an adaptive path splitting policy to provide full protection against single-link failures with partial backup resource, and design an agile frequency slot windows choosing mechanism to mitigate the spectrum fragmentation for link resource efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed APSS scheme can achieve satisfactory performance in terms of spectrum utilization and blocking ratio. Second, we propose a synchronous evacuation strategy for VNs with dual virtual machines (VMs) inside a disaster risk zone (DRZ), which suffer higher risks than the VNs with single. The evacuation strategy exploits post-copy technique to sustain the online service alive and enhances synchronous VM migrations to shorten the dual-VM evacuation time. Numerical results show that the proposed strategy can outperform the best-effort scheme in terms of average and total evacuation times of dual-VMs.Comment: Master Degree Thesis at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunication