Deep-Unfolding Network Slicing for Deterministic Delay Services in Multi-Access Edge Computing

Deterministic demand of mission-critical applications is essential in edge computing systems for realizing Industry 4.0. However, the conventional average-based network slicing schemes incur unexpected long-tail delay, resulting in the failure to meet strict deterministic delay guarantee. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we construct a two-scale TNS-Net architecture for the URLLC slice under the network slicing paradigm, aiming to meet deterministic end-to-end (E2E) delay requirements of multiple users with minimal resource usage. We consider multi-access edge computing (MEC) and model it as a many-to-one cascade queue, which includes the offloading queues at the user equipments (UEs) and a computation queue at the server. To analyze the delay performance, we decompose the offloading process into transmission and vacation periods, and employ the weighted approximation to address the multi-UE coupling in the computation process to derive the closed-form approximate E2E delay distribution. Based on the derived delay distribution, we propose an iterative two-scale network slicing (TNS) algorithm to guarantee deterministic delay, and construct a TNS-based deep-unfolding neural network, called TNS-Net, to improve the solution in presence of inaccurate channel statistics. Moreover, for the training of TNS-Net with deterministic delay as the network input, we apply extreme value theory (EVT) to analyze the distribution characteristic of delay bound violation. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that our theoretical analysis provides a relatively accurate estimate and the proposed TNS-Net ensures better delay guarantee with lower resource consumption.