A new RAN slicing strategy for multi-tenancy support in a WLAN scenario

Abstract

Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing is a key technology, based on Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which aims at providing a more efficient utilization of the available network resources and the reduction of the operational costs. In that respect, in this paper a novel virtualized WiFi network hypervisor is presented. This new hypervisor, based on a time variant radio resource sharing mechanism named Weighted Air-Time Deficit Round Robin (WADRR), is able to follow the dynamicity of the traffic variations seen by the different tenants located to the network Access Points (APs). It will be shown that the proposed WADRR hypervisor is able to dynamically assign the appropriate resources per tenant in every AP of the network, according to its specific traffic requirements. To this end, all the network APs are instructed by a controller which is responsible of guaranteeing, on average (long term perspective) and over the whole network, the accomplishment of the tenant's Service Level Agreement (SLA) target, while satisfying the short term traffic requests in the individual network APs. The correct behavior of the proposed algorithm has been validated through both simulations and in a real SDN-NFV platform build upon the 5G-EmPOWER test-bed.