Multi-tenant resource sharing with equitable-priority-based performance isolation of slices for 5G cellular systems

Performance Assessment of an ITU-T Compliant Machine Learning Enhancements for 5G RAN Network Slicing

“…In this section, we discuss the use of ML in 5G systems including the ITU-T architectural framework for ML integration and applications of ML techniques for network slicing. We refer the reader to [13] for a survey of 5G network slicing enablers, architectures and deployment strategies, and to [5], [14] for recent reviews on RAN resource allocation to slices.…”

“…Applications of ML for network slicing enhancement can be manifold [15], however, resource allocation among slices receives the most attention from researchers. Indeed, in the majority of policies proposed so far for network slicing in RAN, the resource shares allocated to slices/slice users are determined as a solution to a linear or non-linear optimization problem [5]. However, considering the numerous constraints and the dimension of the problem, obtaining such a solution fast enough for a real-time adaptive resource reallocation can be challenging.…”

“…We assume that resources are shared among slices using the slicing scheme with equitable-priority-based performance isolation of slices proposed in [5]. Let C s ≥ 0 represent the capacity of slice s ∈ S and let it follow the number of users in the slice in the form C s = N s R s , where R s is the user data rate in slice s ∈ S to be determined by the slicing scheme.…”

“…For N ∈ Ω opt , we seek to allocate resources in a way to (i) satisfy the minimum and maximum constraints (10), (ii) to make use of the whole available capacity and (iii) to provide max-min fairness to users taking account of whether the contracted number of users is exceeded and by how much. Such an allocation, for N ∈ Ω opt , can be found as a solution to the optimization problem [5]…”

“…The specification also demands slice isolation, although defined in a broad sense encompassing multiple levels such as security, performance, etc. Providing performance isolation of slices along with efficient use of system resources and fairness of their allocation is a difficult task since these requirements are largely contradictory [5], [6]. The problem is even more challenging when slicing is extended to the RAN, where dynamic channel conditions need to be accounted for when designing isolation schemes.…”