Abstract
Network slicing has emerged as a promising technical solution to ensure the coexistence of various 5G services. While the 5G architecture evolution for supporting slicing has been exhaustively studied, the architectural option impacts on RAN resource allocation efficiency remain unclear. This article fills a gap in this area by evaluating the impact of architecture choices on the quality of service of different services in the new 5G ecosystem, focusing on ultra-reliable low-latency communication applications. We propose architectural options based on the placement of the entities responsible for implementing these functions. We then assess their impact on the radio resource allocation flexibility when slices span two radio access technologies with redundant coverage. Our numerical experiments showed that the slice management function placement plays a pivotal role in choosing an adequate radio resource allocation scheme for URLLC slices.
Highlights
This paper is an extension of [15], differing in the following aspects: (i) we examine the business relationships between the novel actors in the 5G ecosystem, (ii) we study new variants and extensions of the resource allocation problem in the proximity of two base stations, and (iii) we provide additional analyses regarding the impact of architectural options on each new proposed scenario
The NSMF translates the E2E high-level performance requirements desired by the tenant to the Core Network (CN) and Radio Access Network (RAN) low-level requirements managed by the Network Slice Subnet Management Function (NSSMF)
We first identified the different RAN resource allocation actors while shedding light on their business relationships and their ownership of the slice management functions. Depending on this ecosystem description, we studied various options for the placement of the management entities involved in resource allocation and traffic steering decisions while focusing on the challenging use case of Ultra-Reliable and Low-LatencyCommunications (URLLC)
Summary
In [10], the authors probed into RAN slicing management in a multi-cell network by studying four architecture proposals for radio resource sharing, and they discuss the different levels of granularity, isolation, and customization aspects. The authors in [11] advocate for radio protocol layer descriptors that outline the features, policies, and resources needed to create and customize multiple RAN slices While these works paved the way for defining the slicing concept in 5G, they did not tackle the impact of the 5G ecosystem openness to new actors on resource allocation implementation in the RAN.
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