Cost-Effective QoS-Aware Network Function Sharing: Optimization and Heuristic Approaches
Ömer Zekvan Yılmaz, Fatih Alagöz · 2025
Providing Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for vertical use cases on the same infrastructure in a cost-effective way is the main focus of modern communication networks. Network Function (NF) sharing is a promising approach for cost efficiency. Meanwhile, in NF sharing environments, maintaining QoS and dealing with new security risks are challenging. In this study, by considering these challenges, we propose an optimum formulation that minimizes the hardware costs to satisfy a number of network slice requests through NF sharing and a suboptimal heuristic algorithm that has polynomial time complexity. Simulations show that our heuristics outperform previous solutions that do not consider NF sharing.