  Network slicing is emerging as a promising method to provide sought-after
versatility and flexibility to cope with ever-increasing demands. To realize
such potential advantages and to meet the challenging requirements of various
network slices in an on-demand fashion, we need to develop an agile and
distributed mechanism for resource provisioning to different network slices in
a heterogeneous multi-resource multi-domain mobile network environment. We
formulate inter-domain resource provisioning to network slices in such an
environment as an optimization problem which maximizes social welfare among
network slice tenants (so that maximizing tenants' satisfaction), while
minimizing operational expenditures for infrastructure service providers at the
same time. To solve the envisioned problem, we implement an iterative auction
game among network slice tenants, on one hand, and a plurality of price-taking
subnet service providers, on the other hand. We show that the proposed solution
method results in a distributed privacy-saving mechanism which converges to the
optimal solution of the described optimization problem. In addition to
providing analytical results to characterize the performance of the proposed
mechanism, we also employ numerical evaluations to validate the results,
demonstrate convergence of the presented algorithm, and show the enhanced
performance of the proposed approach (in terms of resource utilization,
fairness and operational costs) against the existing solutions.
