Enabling RAN Slicing Through Carrier Aggregation in mmWave Cellular Networks

The ever increasing number of connected devices and of new and heterogeneous mobile use cases implies that 5G cellular systems will face demanding technical challenges. For example, Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) scenarios present orthogonal Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that 5G aims to satisfy with a unified Radio Access Network (RAN) design. Network slicing and mmWave communications have been identified as possible enablers for 5G. They provide, respectively, the necessary scalability and flexibility to adapt the network to each specific use case environment, and low latency and multi-gigabit-per-second wireless links, which tap into a vast, currently unused portion of the spectrum. The optimization and integration of these technologies is still an open research challenge, which requires innovations at different layers of the protocol stack. This paper proposes to combine them in a RAN slicing framework for mmWaves, based on carrier aggregation. Notably, we introduce MilliSlice, a cross-carrier scheduling policy that exploits the diversity of the carriers and maximizes their utilization, thus simultaneously guaranteeing high throughput for the eMBB slices and low latency and high reliability for the URLLC flows.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Proc. of the 18th Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet 2020), Arona, Italy, 202

Modeling Profit of Sliced 5G Networks for Advanced Network Resource Management and Slice Implementation

The core innovation in future 5G cellular networksnetwork slicing, aims at providing a flexible and efficient framework of network organization and resource management. The revolutionary network architecture based on slices, makes most of the current network cost models obsolete, as they estimate the expenditures in a static manner. In this paper, a novel methodology is proposed, in which a value chain in sliced networks is presented. Based on the proposed value chain, the profits generated by different slices are analyzed, and the task of network resource management is modeled as a multiobjective optimization problem. Setting strong assumptions, this optimization problem is analyzed starting from a simple ideal scenario. By removing the assumptions step-by-step, realistic but complex use cases are approached. Through this progressive analysis, technical challenges in slice implementation and network optimization are investigated under different scenarios. For each challenge, some potentially available solutions are suggested, and likely applications are also discussed

Resource slicing in virtual wireless networks: a survey

New architectural and design approaches for radio access networks have appeared with the introduction of network virtualization in the wireless domain. One of these approaches splits the wireless network infrastructure into isolated virtual slices under their own management, requirements, and characteristics. Despite the advances in wireless virtualization, there are still many open issues regarding the resource allocation and isolation of wireless slices. Because of the dynamics and shared nature of the wireless medium, guaranteeing that the traffic on one slice will not affect the traffic on the others has proven to be difficult. In this paper, we focus on the detailed definition of the problem, discussing its challenges. We also provide a review of existing works that deal with the problem, analyzing how new trends such as software defined networking and network function virtualization can assist in the slicing. We will finally describe some research challenges on this topic.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Mobility management architecture in different RATs based network slicing

© 2018 IEEE. Network slicing is an architectural solution that enables the future 5G network to offer a high data traffic capacity and efficient network connectivity. Moreover, software defined network (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) empower this architecture to visualize the physical network resources. The network slicing identified as a multiple logical network, where each network slice dedicates as an end-to-end network and works independently with other slices on a common physical network resources. Most user devices have more than one smart wireless interfaces to connect to different radio access technologies (RATs) such as WiFi and LTE, thereby network operators utilize this facility to offload mobile data traffic. Therefore, it is important to enable a network slicing to manage different RATs on the same logical network as a way to mitigate the spectrum scarcity problem and enables a slice to control its users mobility across different access networks. In this paper, we propose a mobility management architecture based network slicing where each slice manages its users across heterogeneous radio access technologies such as WiFi, LTE and 5G networks. In this architecture, each slice has a different mobility demands and these demands are governed by a network slice configuration and service characteristics. Therefore, our mobility management architecture follows a modular approach where each slice has individual module to handle the mobility demands and enforce the slice policy for mobility management. The advantages of applying our proposed architecture include: i) Sharing network resources between different network slices; ii) creating logical platform to unify different RATs resources and allowing all slices to share them; iii) satisfying slice mobility demands

End-to-end Mobile Network Slicing

Wireless networks have gone through several years of evolution until now and will continue to do so in order to cater for the varying needs of its users. These demands are expected to continue to grow even more in the future, both in size and variability. Hence, the 5G technology needs to consider these variabilities in service demands and potential data explosion which could accompany users’ demands at the core of its architecture. For 5G mobile network to handle these foreseen challenges, network slicing \cite{c13} is seen as a potential path to tread as its standardization is progressing. In light of the proposed 5G network architecture and to support and end-to-end mobile network slicing, we implemented radio access network (RAN) slicing over a virtualized evolved Node B (eNodeB) and ensured multiple core network slices could communicate through it successfully. Our results, challenges and further research path are presented in this thesis report