RAN Slicing in Multi-CU/DU Architecture for 5G Services

In the context of 5G mobile networks, various types of services need to be supported. Network slicing is key to enabling a diverse range of services to be accommodated in the same physical network by providing a customized logical network. In a radio access network (RAN), the placement of RAN functions can be customized for each slice in order to satisfy service requirements. In this paper, we propose a RAN slicing architecture which has multiple sets of functional splits and function placement in one cell. For better resource efficiency with the proposed architecture, resource allocation should be updated by RAN controller at a specific interval. We propose a resource allocation method for the architecture which maintains isolation between slices while taking the fulfillment of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) into consideration. The results show that the proposed method guarantees isolation between slices and keeps the probability of SLA fulfillment close to that of the conventional method.