Inter-slice B5G Bandwidth Resource Allocation

Abstract

The Beyond 5G (B5G) networks vision afford wireless access to a vertical market with varying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Network Slicing (NS) is one of the key features that offers the opportunity to have a logical network that affects the market model of these verticals. Accordingly, Network Slicing opens the door to new market players including the Infrastructure Provider (InP) and the Virtual Network Operator (VNO). The InP is the owner of the infrastructure that supports several types of slices. The VNO will buy network resources (i.e., bandwidth) from the InP in order to provide a particular service to its users. Consequently, deciding on the optimal resources allocation among VNO users while maximizing the revenue of the InP has become a fundamental issue that needs to be solved. Previous works have presented optimal solutions for resources allocation and focused mainly on a single scenario based on pricing mechanisms. In this paper, we propose an inter-slice resources allocation based on multiple sets, namely customer residential profile, industry coverage, and business area. We propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation to the problem, describe an admission control scheme and devise a greedy-based heuristic to solve the problem.