Robust <scp>RAN</scp> Slicing

Network slicing is one of the most promising enabling technologies for next generation mobile network (5G), which spans over all domains of the network, including data centers, core networks (CNs), transport networks, and radio access networks (RANs). As such wide range of technologies are involved, it is difficult to ensure an end‐to‐end (network) slice working stably all the time. First, for both CN and RAN slices, bugs may accidentally occur in virtual network functions(VNFs), which can invalidate the slice and trigger a recovery process. In addition, the traffic demands to be accommodated by a CN or RAN slice can be stochastic rather than deterministic parameters, and changes of traffic demands that are too drastic may trigger slice reconfiguration. In this chapter, we investigate a robust RAN slicing mechanism to address slice recovery and reconfiguration in a unified framework. A slice is constituted by a set of VNFs and links and remapping is a process of re‐selecting VNFs and links to recover failures. As a baseline, we first formulate a recovery problem to solve remapping of a slice with deterministic traffic demands. Based on that, we propose two robust RAN slicing algorithms for slice recovery under stochastic demands. Numerical results reveal that the proposed robust RAN slicing algorithms can provide adjustable tolerance of traffic uncertainties, compared with the baseline algorithm. In addition, the tradeoff between the robustness of slices and the average load of links and the tradeoff between the robustness and the average recovery time of slices can be efficiently managed and controlled.