Hypergraph Theory for Network Slicing

Abstract

Network slicing (NS) is one of the main enablers of the new radio (NR) cellular communication systems (5G). NS allows operators to fully utilize the physical infrastructure by allowing multiple logical infrastructures to co-exist. So, different architectures of different technical requirements can be virtualized and deployed on the same physical infrastructure. This feature is expected to become the standard approach of deploying private cellular networks (PCN) for commercial, industrial and governmental sectors. However, there are many challenges related to fully realizing network slicing in real life. One of the main challenges is designing new architectures and algorithms to process numerous interlinked logical networks and interconnected physical infrastructures. The growing complexity of 5G networks can affect the optimal provisioning of resources within an acceptable timeframe. In this paper, we propose a new hypergraph-based network slicing framework that utilizes hypergraph theory in order to process the slice links and connections. Hypergraphs possess a generalization feature that can be employed to improve the performance of the network slicing framework. Simulations show hypergraph provides faster processing and better resource allocation compared to existing provisioning approaches including complex networks.