Physical Resource Management Based on Complex Network Theory in 5G Network Slice Trading

Network slicing enables wireless networks to support various use cases by slicing an infrastructure network into multiple dedicated logical networks. From the perspective of infrastructure network providers, improving network resource efficiency and accepting more network slice requests have direct effects on increasing the revenue. However, the infrastructure providers have to reject some slice requests due to the limitation of physical node capacity. Hence, in this paper, we propose an efficient node capacity expansion algorithm to dramatically increase the revenue of infrastructure providers by reinvesting small cost to expand the capacity of some physical nodes. We adopted complex network theory to obtain the topological information of the infrastructure network. With the topological information, we defined a node priority metric to rank the physical nodes aimed at selecting the nodes with the most embedding potential for virtual nodes. Through extensive simulation study, we demonstrated that our proposed algorithm can expand physical node capacity accurately for providing (i) higher resource efficiency and (ii) higher acceptance ratio of slice requests.