SDN/NFV, Machine Learning, and Big Data Driven Network Slicing for 5G

Abstract

5G networks are expected to be able to satisfy a variety of vertical services for mobile users, business demands, and automotive industry. Network slicing is a promising technology for 5G to provide a network as a service (NaaS) for a wide range of services that run on different virtual networks deployed on a shared network infrastructure. Moreover, the SON (self-organizing network) in 5G is expected as a significant evolution to guarantee for full intelligence, automatic, and faster management and optimization. To deal with those requirements, recently, software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), big data, and machine learning have been proposed as emerging technologies and the necessary tools for 5G, especially, for network slicing. This study aims to integrate various machine learning (ML) algorithms, big data, SDN, and NFV to build a comprehensive architecture and an experimental framework for the future SONs and network slicing. Finally, based on this framework, we successfully implemented an early state traffic classification and network slicing for mobile broadband traffic applications implemented at Broadband Mobile Lab (BML), National Chiao Tung University (NCTU).