5G Mutually Exclusive Access to Network Slices by Adaptively Prioritized Subset Algorithm

In 5G mobile networks, users can request services from different network slices in the core network. However, in 3GPP Release 16 (R16), Mutually Exclusive Access to Network Slices (MEANS) was introduced, in which some services may not be accessed simultaneously by the same user. Because the users do not know which slices are mutually incompatible, and the core network has no specific way to deal with it, the mechanisms defined in the standards will not only cause signaling overhead but waste additional time. In this paper, we propose Adaptively Prioritized Subset Algorithm (APSA) as a solution to MEANS, which follows the principles discussed in the 3GPP documents. We conducted an extensive simulation to evaluate the proposed APSA. The results show that our proposed APSA not only uses fewer signaling messages to access the network slices but also outperforms other algorithms compared in this paper.