A practical resource management prototype for mobile networks

Network slicing is a promising approach to meet the diverse requirements of the various use cases in the 5G networks. Hence, the mobile operators are moving forward to leveraging network slicing in order to measure up with the individual service expectations in their networks. Deploying different network slice types requires the global view of the network and the automated orchestration and management of the underlying resources. This is facilitated by utilizing software-defined networking and network function virtualization as the 5G key-enabler technologies. In this paper, we propose a practical network slicing resource management scheme which is comprised of a dynamic, priority-based resource allocation cooperating with an admission control unit. Adopting the proposed dynamic resource allocation would allow the admission control to comply with more NS requests while ensuring the desired requirements of the existing network slices. To validate the effectiveness of such a mechanism in a real environment, we take advantage of the features provided by OpenAirInterface and FlexRAN to efficiently manage multiple isolated network slices. In particular, we evaluate the significance of the network slicing, the isolation degree among created slices, and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme through several practical scenarios.