On Policy Based RAN Slicing for Emerging 5G TDD Networks

This paper introduces the concept of soft Policy based Slicing in the emerging 5G Time Division Duplex (TDD) networks, considering varying traffic conditions and asymmetric application usage patterns. The proposed approach relies on a flexible service-oriented slicing considering diverse applications with heterogeneous Quality of Service (QoS) demands in terms of throughput, latency, etc. It introduces a separate and customized Uplink/Downlink (UL/DL) pattern per slice taking into account the desired Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is mapped on to a QoS policy for facilitating slicing of the radio access resources. Such a QoS policy allows the flexible allocation of Resource Blocks (RBs) considering the entire spectrum for individual services, while a dynamic resource variation additionally allocates temporarily unused RBs to particular slices in need. The end-to-end system aspects considering the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) network orchestration and management architecture are also discussed and an exhaustive simulation campaign is conducted to validate our proposals against the current state- of-the-art.