Joint Caching Allocation and Delay Control for Network Slices Carrying Multimedia Services in 5G Core Network

As one of the most important technologies, network slicing (NS) has received extensive attention and research efforts in recent years. The infrastructure providers (InP) can divide the physical network into multiple logical networks by NS, and the service provider (SP) can rent these NS instances from the InP to meet their own requirements. Since most multimedia services are usually QoS-aware, such as virtual reality (VR), mobile high-definition video and so on, caching resource can be allocated to different NS instances on demand to reduce the transmission delay and improving the quality of experience (QoE) of end-users. Due to the limited amount of caching resource, the issue about how to efficiently allocate caching resource to increase network revenues and save expenses becomes very critical for InPs. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a delay-constrained caching resource allocation scheme based on Benders decomposition algorithm. It can maximize the revenues of InPs while meeting the service requirement of each network slice. Finally, extensive numerical simulations are executed to verify the performance of the proposed scheme.