Highly flexible RAN slicing approach to manage isolation, priority, efficiency

The evolution toward 5G is driven by the need of providing a wide range of services differing on needed network functionalities, performance requirements, type of devices and going beyond the human-type communications. Such wide variety of requirements cannot be always met through a common network setting, hence, high network flexibility and scalability are required. Network slicing allows the operation of multiple end-to-end logical networks on a common physical infrastructure: each network slice is tailored to best support a specific service. Network slicing on the Radio Access Network (RAN) domain is challenging. In order to manage the scarce radio resources, RAN slicing requires flexibility, efficient resource sharing and customization. Hence, dynamic resource management presents unique challenges, it has to take into account different issues that can be also in contrast each other. This paper proposes a two-layer scheduler for an efficient and low complexity RAN slicing approach in actual systems. It is shown that simply setting some parameters it is possible to achieve different trade-offs between isolation and efficiency, allowing the management of priority and customization. The performance of the proposed method has been compared with other benchmark approaches to show the good behavior and the flexibility of the proposed approach.