Toward Operator-to-Waveform 5G Radio Access Network Slicing

Radio access network (RAN) slicing realizes a vision where physical network resources that belong to a specific infrastructure provider can be shared among multiple mobile network operators (MNOs). Existing work in this area has addressed RAN slicing at different levels of network abstractions, but has often neglected the multitude of tightly intertwined inter-level operations involved in real-world slicing systems. For this reason, this article discusses a novel framework for operator-to-waveform 5G RAN slicing. In the proposed framework, slicing operations are treated holistically, including MNO's selection of base stations (BSs) and maximum number of users, down to the waveform-level scheduling of resource blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed framework provides up to 150% improvement in terms of number of resource blocks that can be used to enable 5G transmission technologies that require coordination and synchronization among BSs.