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

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 colocating the Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) of a slice. We address this issue by introducing slices, where each slice is tied to a specific pair of ingress and egress nodes of a slice. Then, we optimize the bandwidth consumed by each slice by co-locating its VNF instances that communicate the most. We observed that enabling microslicing was able to save about 2 times more control and data plane traffic and it also resulted in a more even distribution of computational and link load compared to when it was disabled.