Providing Throughput Guarantees in Multi-Domain Networks in 6G

While the deployment of 5G networks is going on at a high pace, the research and industrial community have already started looking into the next generation of cellular networks, 6G. One of the main features envisioned in 6G are multi-domain networks, where both public networks (owned by cellular network operators) and private networks (owned by different users/institutions) will be deployed and would need to inter-operate in order to provide a satisfying level of service to the users. However, as these networks are operated by different entities, it is very challenging to provide end-to-end guarantees to a user whose data traverse multiple networks before reaching the destination, either in terms of the maximum latency, minimum throughput, or reliability. In this work, we focus on soft throughput guarantees. The approach we follow here is to use statistical knowledge from the activity of users or their data rate if the latter is constant, which can be obtained by the corresponding networks, in other network domains to determine the throughput range. We provide an analytical approach that determines this range, depending on how narrow the range needs to be. The evaluation is performed on input data from a publicly-available dataset. Results show that the soft guarantees lead to unchanged low-variability end-to-end throughput with more efficient resource utilization (an improvement of 18%) than to focus on strict rates and/or policies oblivious to other networks, such as Round-robin.