Dimensioning resources of Network Slices for energy-performance trade-off

Within network slicing, Virtual Network Embedding has been vastly studied, i.e., deciding in which physical nodes and links to place virtual functions and links. However, the performance of slices does not only depend on where virtual functions and links are placed, but also on how much resources they can use, which has been mostly neglected in the literature. We thus propose a method for optimal resource dimensioning, via dimensioning capacities of multiple Jackson networks (one per slice) co-existing in the same resource-constrained network. Despite the long history of Jackson networks, we are the first, to the best of our knowledge, to model such a problem. The objective is to minimize energy consumption while satisfying the latency requirements of heterogeneous service providers. We show numerically that our solution is able to achieve both goals, differently from classic approaches, which assume that the amount of resources assigned to slices is fixed a-priori.