A Service-Oriented Spectrum-Aware RAN-Slicing Trading Scheme Under Spectrum Sharing

The explosive growth on emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications makes our telecommunications networks confront twofold challenges. One is to provide sufficient flexibility for service diversity. The other is the shortage on spectrum. Network slicing and spectrum sharing have been deemed as two prominent solutions, which, however, are barely jointly studied in the literature. In this article, standing on both aspects, we propose a service-oriented spectrum-aware RAN-slicing trading (SSRT) scheme to achieve a dynamic on-demand RAN slicing under the spectrum sharing scenario. For the SSRT scheme, we jointly slice multidimensional resources, including heterogeneous spectrums (licensed and shared), time, and network facilities (nodes, radios, and powers). In particular, considering the uncertainty of shared spectrums, we distinguish them from the traditional licensed ones to fulfill different types of sessions, which are classified into delay tolerant and delay sensitive. To achieve an effective isolation, we construct a 4-D conflict graph and formulate the slice generation problem into a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, where a cross-layer resource allocation based on a hybrid transmission mode is designed for the customization. To cope with the difficulties when solving the problem, we employ the column generation algorithm to obtain the final slicing result over all the resources. The simulation results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.