Federated Network Slicing in Multi-Domain, Multi-Technology, and Multi-Provider Networks

In multi-domain multi-technology network slicing (NS), different service providers within the same and/or different administrative domains are involved in meeting a service level agreement (SLA). In fact, the SLA requirements must be dynamically decomposed into portions that each domain can support based on their network condition. This paper presents a framework to design federated multi-domain NS in which providers collaborate to set policies for SLA decomposition, task offloading, routing, and resource sharing across domains. First, a centralized scheme is proposed as a benchmark where a cross-domain orchestrator decomposes the SLA and performs multi-path routing and resource allocation in negotiation with the domain controllers. Then, we adopt decomposition theory to delegate decomposing the SLA to each domain controller and create multi-domain network slices in a fully distributed manner. Through consistency pricing, we enforce fair collaboration between domains to share resources and perform task-split offloading and multi-path multi-domain routing. We evaluate our approach using typical sixth-generation (6G) real-world examples. Our results show that our approach achieves two to four times higher utility compared to schemes without collaboration and/or SLA decomposition.