Network Slicing in IEEE 802.11ah

Recently, Network Slicing in Radio Access Technologies (RATs) has been proposed as an approach to divide the wireless network infrastructure into isolated logical slices which are defined following their requirements and features in a service-driven way. To the best of our knowledge, the application of Network Slicing has not been explored in IEEE 802.11ah Networks. In this work, we propose a Virtual Network Slicing Broker (VNSB), a Virtual Network Function (VNF) instantiated inside a Software Defined Network (SDN) controller which communicates with an IEEE 802.11ah network Access Point (AP) via a southbound Application Program Interface (API). Based on information obtained by the northbound API, the slicing broker gets the information contained in the slicing templates, which describes the services features and respective Quality of Service (QoS) restrictions. With these data, the slicing broker makes logical slices in the context of the Restricted Access Windows (RAW) which are periodically sent by the AP to the stations (STA) via the Raw Parameter Set (RPS). Since there is no hardware with the IEEE 802.11ah standard available on the market, we validate the proposed solution through extensive simulations in a typical smart city scenario. Results showed the broker capacity to build and manage logical slices per service, respecting the QoS restrictions of each offered service. Moreover, the proposed slicing broker makes use of available resources of neighbor slices reducing delay, packet loss, and efficiently maximizing throughput per slice.