Application-Driven End-to-End Slicing: When Wireless Network Virtualization Orchestrates With NFV-Based Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Recently, to adapt to the various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of emerging applications, application-driven network slicing has attracted intensive interests. In this paper, we apply the idea of software-defined wireless network virtualization (WiNV) to WiFi networks and design and demonstrate a novel network system, namely, ADE2WiNFV. The proposed system can orchestrate software-defined WiNV with network-function-virtualization-based mobile edge computing (MEC) to realize application-driven end-to-end (E2E) slicing over heterogeneous wireline/wireless networks. Our experimental demonstrations verify that ADE2WiNFV can realize application-aware E2E slices on demand, each of which contains not only guaranteed E2E bandwidth resources (i.e., in the forms of virtual links, virtual switches, and virtual access points) but also isolated IT resources (i.e., in the form of virtual network functions) to carry specific applications with QoS guarantees.

Keywords

• Software-defined networking (SDN)
• network function virtualization (NFV)
• mobile edge computing (MEC)
• application-driven slicing
• heterogeneous networks