Trading Based Service-Oriented Spectrum-Aware RAN-Slicing Under Spectrum Sharing

The fast development on emerging services makes our telecommunications networks witness two key problems. One is the flexibility to fulfill the diverse service requests and the other is the shortage on spectrum. Network slicing and spectrum sharing have been regarded as two prominent solutions, which, however, are barely jointly studied. When taking the shared spectrum into account, its unique feature of heterogeneity and uncertainty will bring new challenges for the slicing. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented spectrum-aware RAN-slicing trading (SSRT) scheme with a comprehensive consideration on both aspects. For the SSRT scheme, we jointly slice three kinds of resources, namely, time, spectrum (including both licensed one and shared one), and network facilities, according to the diverse traffic requests, which are classified into delay-tolerant (DT) ones and delay-sensitive (DS) ones, as well as the willing payments from different service providers (SPs). To achieve both inter-slice and intra-slice isolation, we construct a three-dimensional (3D) conflict graph and formulate the SSRT scheme into a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem with a cross-layer spectrum-aware resource allocation and a hybrid transmission mode (including both single-hop and multi-hop). Since finding all the maximum independent sets (MIS) for the 3D conflict graph is an NP-hard problem, we further develop an iterative heuristic algorithm for the MIS determination.