PhD Dissertation Defense: Omar Abdul-Latif

PhD Dissertation Defense: Omar Abdul-Latif, PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology

End-to-End Network Slicing using Hypergraph Theory

Wednesday April 26, 2023; 9:00AM, Room: 2575/2585, Hugh L. Carey Hall

Zoom link: https://rit.zoom.us/j/97964672062 

Network slicing is based on the concept of network virtualization and is expected to result in complete softwarization of 5G, Beyond-5G (B5G) and 6G when it reaches maturity. This means that future networks will only need minimal physical infrastructure upgrades (mostly in the frontend of the network). Network slicing is identified as one of the key enablers of next generation wireless mobile networks due to its ability to multiplex virtualized and independent architectures on the same physical network infrastructure. The virtual architectures can be tailored to the technical requirements of specific verticals or applications. However, there is still the challenge of providing type-specific mechanism to generate and provision the virtual networks (i.e. network slices (NS)) that are tailor-made for specific applications. This challenge is currently an active research topic in the field of wireless communication networks. In this research work, three end-to-end network slicing provisioning frameworks were designed and simulated. We started with the existing complex-network-based framework and devised an improvement scheme  that utilized the more fitting Dijkstra’s and A* algorithms to linearize the provisioning time needed to process the number of network slice requests (NSR). A new hypergraph-based framework utilizing the generalization feature of hypergraphs is proposed to optimize the resource scheduling and bandwidth allocation procedures. The hypergraph-game-based framework employs two altruistic games, which are used for the resources and bandwidth selection operations. Lastly, spiking neural networks (SNN) are utilized to design the proposed hypergraph-SNN-based framework that minimal provisioning time and while optimizing resource scheduling and performance of the network. All frameworks were designed to satisfy the  requirement constraints of their service types and  the quality-of-service (QoS) associated with them. The performance of the frameworks was assessed in terms of resource utilization and acceptance ratios while maintaining near optimum provisioning time requirement. The simulation results of the proposed complex-network framework are promising and established a proof-of-concept for the end-to-end provisioning performance. The hypergraph-game-based frameworks produced better results when compared to other methods presented in the literature. Finally, the hypergraph-SNN-based framework produced superior results that addressed the main challenges of minimizing the execution time while maintaining high resource efficiency and acceptance ratio in the provisioning process of NSRs.

Advisors: Dr. Muhieddin Amer & Dr. Andres Kwasinski