Service Admission Control for 5G Mobile Networks with RAN and Core Slicing

The future 5G mobile networks are expected to provide agile services to users with different requirement levels. These services need isolated and independent lifecycle management. Network slicing is considered as a solution for simultaneous onboarding of these services. The main idea behind the network slicing is the split of the resources of the radio access network (RAN) and core network (CN) between different services while the service requirements are met and service operations are independent. Each slice is composed of a set of RAN and CN resources and is assigned to one or some services. One of the important challenges in a slice-based mobile network is the service (or slice) admission control problem. It is referred to the process of determining the policy of the mobile network operator (MNO) for admitting the service requests. However, most of the conducted studies for service admission control problem in network slicing only considers the resources of the RAN layer. In this paper, we model the problem of service admission control considering the CN and RAN layers resource allocation while maximizing the MNO's profit. Due to the boolean programming nature of the proposed problem, we introduce a two-step sub-optimal algorithm. In each step of the proposed algorithm, a heuristic for a variant form of the knapsack problem is solved. Finally, through simulations, the proximity of the proposed algorithm to the optimal solution is inferred.