On-Demand Cooperation Among Multiple Infrastructure Networks for Multi-Tenant Slicing: a Complex Network Perspective

Network slicing is a promising technology for wireless networks to provide various services using limited resources of infrastructure networks. In order to decrease capital expenditure and operational expenditure, multi-tenant slicing provides resource sharing mechanisms among multiple infrastructure providers (InPs). However, one of the main challenges for cooperation among InPs is to meet the diverse demands of various services considering the different structural characteristics of each InP. In this paper, we investigate on-demand cooperation among multiple infrastructure networks from a perspective of the complex network. Four typical network topologies are used to imitate different practical infrastructure networks. The proposed cooperation strategy contains two stages, the selection of connectors and the creation of interconnections. We adopt the complex network theory to obtain the topological information of infrastructure networks. With the topological information, connectors are selected with selection fitness, and interconnections between connectors are created using the two-sided matching. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted, and the effects of variables in the two stages are analyzed. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed strategy performs better in terms of meeting the demand.