Auction-based Network Slicing Architecture and Experimentation on SD-RANs

The 5G communication era brings innovations to the Radio Access Networks (RANs) to support increasing traffic demands and a wide variety of network services, where the network slicing is a key technology. However, heterogeneous access technologies (e.g., LTE, WLAN and WiMAX) have their unique mechanism representing and allocating radio resources. In addition, with the coexistence of multiple RANs, network providers may compete with each other in offering accesses and resources. In order to converge to an optimal network slicing scheme under this circumstance, we propose an architecture based on Software Defined RANs (SD-RANs) and auction theories. Our proposed system supports modular deployment to heterogeneous RANs and is capable in achieving slicing through the negotiation with all network providers. The efficiency and scalability of the system are verified by a prototype that we implement with open-source SD-RAN platforms FlexRAN and 5G-EmPOWER.