Self-optimized admission control for multi-tenant radio access networks

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Multi-tenant Radio Access Networks (RANs) are envisaged to play a key role in highly dense scenarios for fulfilling the challenging capacity requirements of future enhanced Mobile BroadBand services while reducing the capital and operational costs per tenant. In this context, this paper proposes a self-optimized Admission Control (AC) strategy for automatically adjusting the share of resources per tenant in each cell of the shared RAN in order to account for uneven time/space distributions of tenants’ traffic demand across cells. The proposed approach is evaluated by means of simulations to analyze the operation of the self-optimization process under different traffic distributions. Results reveal that the proposed self-optimized AC can provide substantial throughput gains of up to 65% with respect to the case without self-optimization.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Guaranteed bit rate traffic prioritisation and isolation in multi-tenant radio access networks

©2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Network slicing is a key feature of forthcoming 5G systems to facilitate the partitioning of the network into multiple logical networks customised according to different operation and application needs. Network slicing allows the materialisation of multi-tenant networks, in which the same infrastructure is shared among multiple communication providers, each one using a different slice. The support of multi-tenancy through slicing in the Radio Access Network (RAN) is particularly challenging because it involves the configuration and operation of multiple and diverse RAN behaviour over a common pool of radio resources while guaranteeing a certain Quality of Service (QoS) and isolation to each of the slices. This paper presents a Markovian approach to model different QoS aware Admission Control (AC) policies in a multi-tenant scenario with Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) services. From the analytical model, different metrics are defined to later analyse the effect of AC mechanisms on the performance achieved in various scenarios. Results show the impact of priorities for services of different tenants and isolation between tenants when different AC polices are adopted.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Design and Experimental Validation of a Software-Defined Radio Access Network Testbed with Slicing Support

Network slicing is a fundamental feature of 5G systems to partition a single network into a number of segregated logical networks, each optimized for a particular type of service, or dedicated to a particular customer or application. The realization of network slicing is particularly challenging in the Radio Access Network (RAN) part, where multiple slices can be multiplexed over the same radio channel and Radio Resource Management (RRM) functions shall be used to split the cell radio resources and achieve the expected behaviour per slice. In this context, this paper describes the key design and implementation aspects of a Software-Defined RAN (SD-RAN) experimental testbed with slicing support. The testbed has been designed consistently with the slicing capabilities and related management framework established by 3GPP in Release 15. The testbed is used to demonstrate the provisioning of RAN slices (e.g. preparation, commissioning and activation phases) and the operation of the implemented RRM functionality for slice-aware admission control and scheduling

Design and experimental validation of a software-defined radio access network testbed with slicing support

Network slicing is a fundamental feature of 5G systems to partition a single network into a number of segregated logical networks, each optimized for a particular type of service or dedicated to a particular customer or application. The realization of network slicing is particularly challenging in the Radio Access Network (RAN) part, where multiple slices can be multiplexed over the same radio channel and Radio Resource Management (RRM) functions shall be used to split the cell radio resources and achieve the expected behaviour per slice. In this context, this paper describes the key design and implementation aspects of a Software-Defined RAN (SD-RAN) experimental testbed with slicing support. The testbed has been designed consistently with the slicing capabilities and related management framework established by 3GPP in Release 15. The testbed is used to demonstrate the provisioning of RAN slices (e.g., preparation, commissioning, and activation phases) and the operation of the implemented RRM functionality for slice-aware admission control and scheduling.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version