  With network slicing in 5G networks, Mobile Network Operators can create
various slices for Service Providers (SPs) to accommodate customized services.
Usually, the various Service Function Chains (SFCs) belonging to a slice are
deployed on a best-effort basis. Nothing ensures that the Infrastructure
Provider (InP) will be able to allocate enough resources to cope with the
increasing demands of some SP. Moreover, in many situations, slices have to be
deployed over some geographical area: coverage as well as minimum per-user rate
constraints have then to be taken into account. This paper takes the InP
perspective and proposes a slice resource provisioning approach to cope with
multiple slice demands in terms of computing, storage, coverage, and rate
constraints. The resource requirements of the various SFCs within a slice are
aggregated within a graph of Slice Resource Demands (SRD). Infrastructure nodes
and links have then to be provisioned so as to satisfy all SRDs. This problem
leads to a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation. A two-step approach is
considered, with several variants, depending on whether the constraints of each
slice to be provisioned are taken into account sequentially or jointly. Once
provisioning has been performed, any slice deployment strategy may be
considered on the reduced-size infrastructure graph on which resources have
been provisioned. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the
proposed approach compared to a more classical direct slice embedding approach.
