Service-Oriented Resource Virtualization for Evolving TDD Networks Towards 5G

The provision of service-oriented network resource virtualization, commonly known as network slicing, is envisioned as an answer to the increasing diversity of application demands in evolving 5G mobile networks. Network slicing is helpful in isolating a specified amount of resources in order to accommodate diverse services having heterogeneous requirements that may be conflicting. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented network resource slicing scheme for a Time Division Duplex (TDD) network that, for a pre-defined time duration, forms service-specific network slices based on traffic prediction. The aim of the proposed slicing scheme is to enhance the services, Quality of Experience (QoE) and system resource utilization efficiency by introducing a new degree of flexibility upon allocating resources to different tenants. System-level simulation analysis shows that the proposed scheme improves the performance of high priority services and boosts resource utilization at negligible performance loss for low-priority traffic.