Dynamic and efficient resource allocation for 5G end-to-end network slicing: A multi-agent deep reinforcement learning approach

The rapid evolution of user equipment (UE) and 5G networks drives significant transformations, bringing technology closer to end-users. Managing resources in densely crowded areas such as airports, train stations, and bus terminals poses challenges due to diverse user demands. Integrating mobile edge computing (MEC) and network function virtualization (NFV) becomes vital when the service provider's (SP) primary goal is maximizing profitability while maintaining service level agreement (SLA). Considering these challenges, our study addresses an online resource allocation problem in an MEC network where computing resources are limited, and the SP aims to boost profit by securely admitting more UE requests at each time slot. Each UE request arrival rate is unknown, and the requirement is specific resources with minimum cost and delay. The optimization problem objective is achieved by allocating resources to requests at the MEC network in appropriate cloudlets, utilizing abandoned instances, reutilizing idle and soft slice instances to shorten delay and reduce costs, and immediately scaling inappropriate instances, thus minimizing the instantiation of new instances. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for request prediction and resource allocation to mitigate unnecessary resource waste. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively accepts network slice requests to maximize profit by leveraging resource availability, reutilizing instantiated resources, and upholding goodwill and SLA. Through extensive simulations, we show that our proposed DRL-based approach outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques, namely, MaxSR, DQN, and DDPG, by 76%, 33%, and 23%, respectively.