Network Slicing in Fog Radio Access Networks: Issues and Challenges

Network slicing has been advocated by both academia and industry as a cost-efficient way to enable operators to provide networks on an as-a-service basis and meet the wide range of use cases that the fifth generation wireless network will serve. The existing works on network slicing are mainly targeted at the partition of the core network, and the prospect of network slicing in radio access networks should be jointly exploited. To solve this challenge, enhanced network slicing in F-RANs, called access slicing, is proposed. This article comprehensively presents a novel architecture and related key techniques for access slicing in F-RANs. The proposed hierarchical architecture of access slicing consists of a centralized orchestration layer and a slice instance layer, which makes access slicing adaptively implementable in a convenient way. Meanwhile, key techniques and their corresponding solutions, including radio and cache resource management as well as social-aware slicing, are presented. Open issues in terms of standardization developments and field trials are identified.