Slicing the Edge: Resource Allocation for RAN Network Slicing

Network slicing is considered to be a crucial feature of fifth generation cellular systems. By dividing the network infrastructure into multiple logical segments, network slicing can support parallel services with different requirements. While technology developments focus on slicing the core networks, there are limited studies in network slicing for radio access networks (RAN). Hence, in this letter, we study the RAN slicing and slice coordination, which is formulated as a bi-convex problem. Even though there are complicated couplings between the RAN resource allocation for each slice and the coordination of the slices that share the same resources, we design two algorithms addressing these couplings of this bi-convex problem. Simulation results validate the efficacy of our proposed algorithms.