No-Regret Slice Reservation Algorithms

Emerging network slicing markets promise to boost the utilization of expensive network resources and to unleash the potential of over-the-top services. Their success, however, is conditioned on the service providers (SPs) being able to bid effectively for the virtualized resources. In this paper we consider a hybrid advance-reservation and spot slice market and study how the SPs should reserve slices in order to maximize their performance while not exceeding their budget. We consider this problem in its general form, where the SP demand and slice prices are time-varying and revealed only after the reservations are decided. We develop a learning-based framework, using the theory of online convex optimization, that allows the SP to employ a no-regret reservation policy, i.e., achieve the same performance with a hypothetical policy that has knowledge of future demand and prices. We extend our framework for the scenario the SP decides dynamically its slice orchestration, where it additionally needs to learn which resource composition is performance - maximizing; and we propose a mixed-time scale scheme that allows the SP to leverage any spot-market information revealed between its reservations. We evaluate our learning framework and its extensions using a variety of simulation scenarios and following a detailed parameter sensitivity analysis.