User-Centric Slice Allocation Scheme in 5G Networks and Beyond

Network slicing is a key enabler in the Next Generation 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) to build the RAN-as-a-Service concept. Cloud-RAN, Network Function Virtualization, Software Defined Network and RAN functional splits are the main pillars expected to be integrated to provide the required flexibility. One of the major concerns is to efficiently allocate RAN resources for slices, while supporting multiple use-cases with heterogeneous Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Current related work is adopting radio resource allocation scheme by considering a cell-centric deployment approach for slice embedding. However, to achieve greater flexibility and fine-grained tunable resource utilization, we believe that the deployment scheme should be integrated in the slice design. In this paper, we go a step further and propose a RAN slicing approach with customized deployment scheme on user basis. As the corresponding optimization problem is NP-Hard, we propose a low-cost and efficient heuristic algorithm for RAN Slice allocation based on the Particle Swarm Optimization approach. Our proposal jointly harnesses radio, processing and link resources at user level tailored to the QoS requirements, while customizing efficiently the underlying physical RAN resource usage.