Guaranteed bit rate traffic prioritisation and isolation in multi-tenant radio access networks

Abstract

Network slicing is a key feature of forthcoming 5G systems to facilitate the partitioning of the network into multiple logical networks customised according to different operation and application needs. Network slicing allows the materialisation of multi-tenant networks, in which the same infrastructure is shared among multiple communication providers, each one using a different slice. The support of multi-tenancy through slicing in the Radio Access Network (RAN) is particularly challenging because it involves the configuration and operation of multiple and diverse RAN behaviour over a common pool of radio resources while guaranteeing a certain Quality of Service (QoS) and isolation to each of the slices. This paper presents a Markovian approach to model different QoS aware Admission Control (AC) policies in a multi-tenant scenario with Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) services. From the analytical model, different metrics are defined to later analyse the effect of AC mechanisms on the performance achieved in various scenarios. Results show the impact of priorities for services of different tenants and isolation between tenants when different AC polices are adopted.