Developing specialized cloud-based and open-source testbeds is a practical approach to investigate network slicing functionalities in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. This paper provides a comprehensive review of most of the existing cost-efficient and small-scale testbeds that partially or fully deploy network slicing. First, we present relevant software packages for the three main functional blocks of the ETSI NFV MANO framework and for emulating the access and core network domains. Second, we define primary and secondary design criteria for deploying network slicing testbeds. These design criteria are later used for comparison between the testbeds. Third, we present the state-of-the-art testbeds, including their design objectives, key technologies, network slicing deployment, and experiments. Next, we evaluate the testbeds according to the defined design criteria and present an in-depth summary table. This assessment concludes with the superiority of some of them over the rest and the most dominant software packages satisfying the ETSI NFV MANO framework. Finally, challenges, potential solutions, and future works of network slicing testbeds are discussed.
Network slicing has been a significant technological advance in the 5G mobile network allowing delivery of diverse and demanding requirements. The slicing grants the ability to create customized virtual networks from the underlying physical network, while each virtual network can serve a different purpose. One of the main challenges yet is the allocation of resources to different slices, both to best serve different services and to use the resources in the most optimal way. In this paper, we study the radio resource slicing problem for Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) as two prominent use cases. The URLLC and eMBB traffic is multiplexed over multiple numerologies in 5G New Radio, depending on their distinct service requirements. Therein, we present our optimization algorithm, Mixed-numerology Mini-slot based Resource Allocation (MiMRA), to minimize the impact on eMBB data rate due to puncturing by different URLLC traffic classes. Our strategy controls such impact by introducing a puncturing rate threshold. Further, we propose a scheduling mechanism that maximizes the sum rate of all eMBB users while maintaining the minimum data rate requirement of each eMBB user. The results obtained by simulation confirm the applicability of our proposed resource allocation algorithm.
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