Strategic Network Slicing Management in Radio Access Networks

The network slicing concept introduced for the upcoming 5G networks is expected to radically change the telcos ecosystem. It allows new players, active in different domains, to benefit of tailored connectivity services directly adapted to needs based on different business strategies and technical solutions. To exploit the potential of network slicing, dynamic sharing of resources can bring benefits, in terms of resource efficiency and cost savings. We propose a mechanism where the shared resources are negotiated in the medium term (seconds or minutes) by tenants as in a marketplace. Our game-theoretical proposal allows tenants to take strategic decisions to optimize the management of their slices based on their instantaneous demands. We provide an algorithmic implementation that guarantees the convergence to a single Nash Equilibrium (NE). We integrate our solution on a 3GPP calibrated system level simulator, where a slice-aware scheduling algorithm enforces the tenants decisions at NE. We compare our proposal with a static baseline, that assigns a fixed share of resources to each slice, and show that, by dynamically trading resources in the market, tenants achieve lower costs, and, therefore, higher profits. Finally, we test the scalability of our algorithm to an increasing number of slices in the system. Considering up to 20 slices simultaneously active in the network, the convergence to a NE can be always guaranteed within 1 second.