Network slicing through buffer aware multi-user transmissions

Abstract

Wireless networks are rapidly expanding into diverse industry sectors, each with unique requirements. To address this, network slicing has emerged as a key paradigm, enabling the partitioning of a shared physical network into multiple logical slices, each tailored to specific performance needs. While extensive research has explored network slicing in cellular networks, its application in Wi-Fi, particularly within IEEE 802.11ax, remains underexplored. IEEE 802.11ax introduces Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which facilitates multi-user transmissions, presenting new opportunities for network slicing.

This paper proposes a novel approach for proportional resource allocation in Wi-Fi networks, extending OFDMA scheduling to dynamically allocate radio spectrum among different slices. Additionally, our method supports the adaptive reuse of unused resources, optimizing spectrum utilization. Simulation results using the ns-3 network simulator demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively manages OFDMA scheduling, ensuring that slices meet their performance targets closely for throughput and latency more than the existing state-of-the-art solutions.