NeTS: Small: AutoSlicing: Safe Online Autonomous Network Orchestration Towards Pervasive Slicing-as-a-Service
This project is supported by NSF #2333164 (09/01/2024-08/31/2027).
Project Description
Sharing network resources using "network slicing" is the key technique in cellular 5G and beyond wireless networks to flexibly and cost-efficiently support emerging applications with extremely diverse needs, such as augmented reality (AR), autonomous driving, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). With the momentum of open network initiatives (e.g., O-RAN), the network orchestration problem--how to provide needed resources to a dynamic and diverse set of applications--becomes increasingly complex and challenging, due factors such as the high number of network states and the need for nearly real-time control (e.g., milliseconds). Existing coarse-grained solutions cannot tackle this fine-grained network orchestration problem in terms of responsiveness, cost-efficiency, and autonomy, which limits the wide adoption of network slicing by telecommunication network providers. The vision of this project is to achieve network slicing as a service (slicing-as-a-service) with autonomous network orchestration to agilely support arbitrary mobile applications with extremely low costs. This project would advance online network automation in next-generation mobile networks, in terms of autonomy, intelligence, adaptability, and assurance.
This project outlines a new autonomous network orchestration framework (AutoSlicing) to achieve pervasive slicing-as-a-service towards next-generation mobile networks. The fundamental idea is to enable deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies to continually learn to orchestrate and adapt to domain shifting with assured service-level agreement (SLA) of slices via interacting with real-world networks. Specifically, the following research thrusts will be investigated. First, new offline simulator augmentation techniques will be designed to reduce the sim-to-real gap by augmenting existing network simulators. Second, new online network orchestration techniques will be designed to prepare the Deep Reinforcement learning policy for potential domain shifting in real-world networks. The augmented simulator will be used for policy training and evaluation during online network orchestration. In addition, AutoSlicing will be implemented and deployed on an end-to-end mobile network at a site-scale testbed at UNL and a city-scale PAWR platform.
Personnel
- Principal Investigator: Dr. Qiang Liu, Assistant Professor, School of Computing, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- Graduate Student: Ming Zhao
Publication
- InSlicing: Interpretable Learning-Assisted Network Slice Configuration in Open Radio Access Networks, Ming Zhao, Yuru Zhang, Qiang Liu, Ahan Kak, Nakjung Choi, IEEE INFOCOM NG-OPERA, 2025
- AdaSlicing: Adaptive Online Network Slicing under Continual Network Dynamics in Open Radio Access Networks, Ming Zhao, Yuru Zhang, Qiang Liu, Ahan Kak, Nakjung Choi, IEEE INFOCOM 2025-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, 2025
- Information Bottleneck-Based Domain Adaptation for Hybrid Deep Learning in Scalable Network Slicing, Tianlun Hu, Qi Liao, Qiang Liu, Georg Carle, IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking, 2024
Broader Impacts