A Multi-Criteria Decision Making Method for Network Slice Edge Infrastructure Selection.

In the era of 5G networks, the demand for high quality service provisioning is growing extremely fast. The enabling of Network Function Virtualization and Network Slicing in the scope of 5G network aims to meet the strict requirements of various business cases. Alongside, the complexity of deployment such services becomes also higher, regarding the differences between infrastructure capabilities and the plethora of various individual requirements. This fact makes the selection of the appropriate infrastructure for slice deployment a complex, but also, a major process, as the optimization of the selection leads to the satisfaction of the user and the better resource allocation from the provider's perspective. In this work, an Edge PoP Selection framework for network slice deployment is proposed. This framework takes into account the user's hard and soft requirements and performs a two-stage selection. The selection of the appropriate infrastructure is based on a multi-criteria decision making method. The proposed framework is evaluated and compared with simple filtering and single-objective selection approaches. The promising results show the importance of the two stage framework in order to simultaneously meet the user's requirements and the optimal utilization of the resources.