Energy Efficiency and Delay Optimization of Virtual Slicing of Fog Radio Access Network

To develop the energy efficient of 6G networks, the fog radio access network (F-RAN) is expected to meet various use cases of high-performance mobile services. Although network virtualization greatly enhances the flexibility to accommodate various services, the interaction and optimization between delay and energy efficiency (EE) in virtual slicing (VS)-based F-RAN have not been well studied. To accomplish the EE and delay optimization of VS of F-RAN. The key technical challenges lie in the construction of new network architecture, the integration and optimization of radio, caching, and computing 3-D resources, reducing the algorithm’s complexity, and simulation verification. We first design a novel network architecture based on VS and fog computing. The VS method in F-RAN to embed VS assembles virtual radio, caching, and computing resources into physical substrates, transforming nonconvex problems into convex optimization problems by transforming constraints and using Lyapunov optimization methods. We further propose a virtual resource allocation optimization algorithm based on EE. To reduce the complexity of the algorithm, a low-complexity EE optimization algorithm is further proposed for virtual resource allocation. The simulation results show that the low-complexity virtual resource allocation EE optimization algorithm proposed in this article has better performance than the existing fog access network resource allocation methods. The EE is further improved by about 30% under the condition that the guaranteed delay threshold is two slots (i.e., 1 ms).