Decomposing SLAs for Network Slicing

When a network slice is requested, multiple technology and/or administrative domains are invoked to ensure that the slice end-to-end service level agreement (SLA) is met. Therefore, this SLA requirement needs to be decomposed in portions that each of the domains can support. In this letter we consider a management architecture consisting of an end-to-end service orchestrator responsible for decomposing the SLA, and domain controllers that govern their respective domain. The orchestrator has no detailed knowledge of the state of the resources in each of the domains when the network slice is requested. The orchestrator is only aware of the responses of the domains to previous requests, and captures this knowledge in a risk model associated with each domain. In this study, we propose an approach for decomposing the end-to-end SLA based on the best current estimate of the risk models of all involved domains. We further describe how the risk model for a particular domain is determined (and updated) based on historical data.