Service Provisioning in Sliced Cloud Radio Access Networks

Network slicing- (NS-) based cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have emerged as a key paradigm to support various novel applications in 5G and beyond networks. However, it is still a challenge to allocate resources efficiently due to heterogeneous quality of service (QoS) requirements of diverse services as well as competition among different network slices. In this paper, we consider a service provisioning allocation framework to guarantee resource utilization while ensuring the QoS of users. Specifically, an inter/intraslice bandwidth optimization strategy is developed to maximize the revenue of the system with multiple network slices. The proposed strategy is hierarchically structured, which decomposes into network-level slicing and packet scheduling level slicing. At the network level, resources are allocated to each slice. At the packet scheduling level, each slice allocates physical resource blocks (PRBs) among users associated with the slice. Numerical results show that the proposed strategy can effectively improve the revenue of the system while guaranteeing heterogeneous QoS requirements. For example, the revenue of the proposed strategy is 21% higher than that of the average allocation strategy.