Two-Level Soft RAN Slicing for Customized Services in 5G-and-Beyond Wireless Communications

In this article, a two-level soft-slicing scheme is proposed for 5G-and-beyond radio access networks to support ultrareliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services with delay/reliability and throughput requirements, respectively. At the network level, we first determine the number of radio resources required for eMBB services and analyze the delay violation probability for URLLC services. Then, an integer nonlinear program is formulated for the network-level resource preallocation. Since the formulated problem is NP-complete, a low-complexity heuristic algorithm is proposed to obtain near-optimal solutions. Given the preallocated resources at each gNodeB (gNB), a gNB-level resource scheduling scheme is designed to enable real-time resource sharing among URLLC services considering the reliability and delay requirements. Simulation results show that the proposed soft-slicing scheme meets stringent quality-of-service requirements for both URLLC and eMBB services and achieves high resource utilization efficiency when compared with conventional hard resource slicing schemes.