Caching Resource Sharing for Network Slicing in 5G Core Network

Network slicing has been considered a promising technology in next generation mobile networks (5G), which can create virtual networks and provide customized service on demand. Most existing works on network slicing mainly focus on virtualization technology, and have not considered in-network caching well. However, in-network caching, as the one of the key technologies for information-centric networking (ICN), has been considered as a significant approach in 5G network to cope with the traffic explosion and network challenges. In this article, the authors jointly consider in-network caching combining with network slicing. They propose an efficient caching resource sharing scheme for network slicing in 5G core network, aiming at solving the problem of how to efficiently share the limited physical caching resource of Infrastructure Provider (InP) among multiple network slices. In addition, from the perspective of network slicing, the authors formulate caching resource sharing problem as a non-cooperative game, and propose an iteration algorithm based on caching resource updating to obtain the Nash Equilibrium solution. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has good convergence performance, and illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.