A Survey and Analysis of Architecture and Models of Network Slicing in 5G

Abstract

Emerging fifth-generation (5G) networks need to fulfill high-reliability and low latency criteria and increase current and future network capacity and security requirements. To support many tenants on the same physical infrastructure, mobile service providers are searching for a virtual solution that can be used to allocate network resources on-demand and gain cost and efficiency using Network Slicing (NS) in 5G networks. NS has been considered as a promising enabler for 5G networks to meet systems ever-increasing and various performance requirements. Through "slicing" it, it is possible to adjust the functionality and performance. Resource separation and practical resource usage are also crucial features of the slicing concept. In this paper, a comprehensive survey was conducted in two directions; first, End-to-End (E2E) 5G NS architecture is studied, different available architecture scenarios are presented, and new architecture is proposed. The proposed architecture is justified by showing a 5G use case. In the second part, the most recent works on the Radio Access Network (RAN) and Transport Network (TN) NS are studied. Common models and algorithms are analyzed to show a research trend as future work. Additional to aggregating the most common topics on NS to have a comprehensive survey in this field.