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Sl-edge: network slicing at the edge

Authors:

Salvatore D'Oro,

Leonardo Bonati,

Francesco Restuccia,

Michele Polese,

Tommaso MelodiaAuthors Info & Claims

Mobihoc '20: Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing

Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3397166.3409133

Published: 11 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Network slicing of multi-access edge computing (MEC) resources is expected to be a pivotal technology to the success of 5G networks and beyond. The key challenge that sets MEC slicing apart from traditional resource allocation problems is that edge nodes depend on tightly-intertwined and strictly-constrained networking, computation and storage resources. Therefore, instantiating MEC slices without incurring in resource over-provisioning is hardly addressable with existing slicing algorithms. The main innovation of this paper is Sl-EDGE, a unified MEC slicing framework that allows network operators to instantiate heterogeneous slice services (e.g., video streaming, caching, 5G network access) on edge devices. We first describe the architecture and operations of Sl-EDGE, and then show that the problem of optimally instantiating joint network-MEC slices is NP-hard. Thus, we propose near-optimal algorithms that leverage key similarities among edge nodes and resource virtualization to instantiate heterogeneous slices 7.5x faster and within 25% of the optimum. We first assess the performance of our algorithms through extensive numerical analysis, and show that Sl-EDGE instantiates slices 6x more efficiently then state-of-the-art MEC slicing algorithms. Furthermore, experimental results on a 24-radio testbed with 9 smartphones demonstrate that Sl-EDGE provides simultaneously highly-efficient slicing of joint LTE connectivity, video streaming over WiFi, and ffmpeg video transcoding.

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Index Terms

Sl-edge: network slicing at the edge
1. Networks

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Mobihoc '20: Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing

October 2020

384 pages

ISBN:9781450380157

DOI:10.1145/3397166

General Chairs:
Tommaso Melodia
Northeastern University
,
Eylem Ekici
The Ohio State University
,
Program Chairs:
Alhussein Abouzeid
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
,
Minghua Chen
City University of Hong Kong

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

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Published: 11 October 2020

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Mobihoc '20: The Twenty-first ACM International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing

October 11 - 14, 2020

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2023.3342711
Puligheddu CAshdown JChiasserini CRestuccia F(2024)SEM-O-RAN: Semantic O-RAN Slicing for Mobile Edge Offloading of Computer Vision TasksIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.333905623:7(7785-7800)Online publication date: Jul-2024
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