Highly Flexible and Traffic Isolating RAN Slicing: A Consumer IoT-Based Use Case

Future networks are envisaged to support an increasingly wide range of diverse services, with distinct service requirements. Network slicing presents an economically sustainable solution to properly handle these stringent requirements, on top of a common physical infrastructure. The support of network slicing at different Radio Access Network (RAN) resource management tasks is particularly challenging, as it involves the dynamic split of the scarce radio resources among the slices, aiming to achieve optimal resource share with traffic isolation of slices. To tackle those challenges, we propose an efficient low-complexity dynamic RAN slicing scheme supported jointly at the Admission Control (AC) and the Packet Scheduling (PS) levels. The scheme relies on a fair AC module to regulate the admission of users from the slices according to a penalty expression considering the expected Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the contracted tenants’ priority. We also develop a PS algorithm based on the tunable slices’ weight, to efficiently fulfill Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of services. Consumer Internet-of-Things (CIoT)-based healthcare services are considered a use case, effectively representing multi-service network slicing applications. Performance evaluation based on extensive simulations shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the referenced baseline schemes, achieving optimal trade-off towards flexible, fair, and efficient resource sharing with sufficient traffic isolation of slices.