Composing 5G Network Slices by Co-locating VNFs in μslices

5G networks leverage network slices for serving use cases with different and potentially conflicting requirements. Current approaches for composing network slices largely overlook the presence of multiple ingress and egress nodes in each network slice. This results in inefficient resource usage even when co-locating the Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) of a slice. The network is thus quickly saturated, and no more use cases can be served. We address this issue by introducing μslices, where each μslice is tied to a specific pair of ingress and egress nodes of a slice. Then, we optimize the bandwidth consumed by each μslice by co-locating its VNF instances that communicate the most. We observed that enabling μslicing was able to save about two times more control and data plane traffic and it also resulted in a more even distribution of computational and link load.