Towards Robust Network Slice Design under Correlated Demand Uncertainties

Network Slicing is envisaged as a key component to address the challenges arising in next generation networks concerning the deployment, control and management of services. Besides, it promotes concurrent operation of multiple logical networks with diverging requirements on a common substrate platform. In this regard, the problem of designing individual logical network slices and mapping them onto the underlying substrate network gains significance. We denote this problem as the Network Slice Design Problem. In this work, we first consider the general network slice design problem. Adopting the robust optimisation approach of Bertsimas and Sim \cite{bertsimas:03}, \cite{bertsimas:04}, we then develop two additional formulations: \begin{inparaenum}[i)] \item to handle traffic demand uncertainties, and \item to account for the correlations among the uncertain traffic demands\end{inparaenum}. Finally, we present an extensive evaluation of the proposed formulations using realistic network instances.