AI-Based Network-Aware Service Function Chain Migration in 5G and Beyond Networks

While the 5G network technology is maturing and the number of commercial deployments is growing, the focus of the networking community is shifting to services and service delivery. 5G networks are designed to be a common platform for very distinct services with different characteristics. Network Slicing has been developed to offer service isolation between the different network offerings. Cloud-native services that are composed of a set of inter-dependent micro-services are assigned into their respective slices that usually span multiple service areas, network domains, and multiple data centers. Due to mobility events caused by moving end-users, slices with their assigned resources and services need to be re-scoped and re-provisioned. This leads to slice mobility whereby a slice moves between service areas and whereby the inter-dependent service and resources must be migrated to reduce system overhead and to ensure low-communication latency by following end-user mobility patterns. Recent advances in computational hardware, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning have attracted interest within the communication community to study and experiment self-managed network slices. However, migrating a service instance of a slice remains an open and challenging process, given the needed co-ordination between inter-cloud resources, the dynamics, and constraints of inter-data center networks. For this purpose, we introduce a Deep Reinforcement Learning based agent that is using two different algorithms to optimize bandwidth allocations as well as to adjust the network usage to minimize slice migration overhead. We show that this approach results in significantly improved Quality of Experience. To validate our approach, we evaluate the agent under different configurations and in real-world settings and present the results.

Automated summary

While 5G networks are maturing and shifting focus to services and service delivery, the research community has been exploring network slicing as a way to provide service isolation. This paper introduces a Deep Reinforcement Learning based agent that uses two different algorithms to optimize bandwidth allocations and minimize slice migration overhead, resulting in significantly improved Quality of Experience.