PROJECT TITLE :

Strategic Network Slicing Management in Radio Access Networks

ABSTRACT:

Network slicing has the potential to significantly alter the relationships between the various actors that make up the ecosystem of the telecommunications industry. New players that are active in different markets may be able to benefit from tailored connectivity services based on different business strategies. We contend that in order to fully capitalize on the opportunities presented by network slicing, it is necessary to engage in dynamic resource sharing. This is important not only for increasing productivity and lowering expenses, but also for paving the way for resource negotiations that can unlock the potential of new business partnerships. We develop an automated mechanism that allows tenants to make strategic decisions to optimize the management of their slices based on their immediate demands, and we model their interaction as if it were a marketplace. This allows tenants to maximize the utilization of their slices. Our solution, which is based on game theory, is integrated on a 3GPP calibrated system level simulator, where a slice-aware scheduler enforces the decisions of the tenants at the Nash Equilibrium (NE). We compare our proposal to a static baseline, which assigns a fixed share of resources to each slice, and show that tenants can achieve lower costs and, as a result, higher profits by dynamically trading resources in the market. This is demonstrated by comparing our proposal to the baseline. We provide an algorithmic implementation that guarantees the convergence to a single NE and test the computational complexity of our algorithm to an increasing number of slices in the system. This allows us to determine whether or not our algorithm is optimal.