UONA: User-Oriented Network slicing Architecture for beyond-5G networks

摘要

In future beyond 5G networks, the demand on the network would be more diversified and personalized. The variety of underlying physical network would also be accelerated by utilization small and heterogeneous cells and the co-existence of cellular networks and other types of wireless networks. User mobility and unexpected application service utilization would highly fluctuate the network demand spatio-temporally. However, per-service and static network slicing considered in 5G networks cannot accommodate such requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel network architecture, User-Oriented Network slicing Architecture (UONA). The proposed architecture has the following two major characteristics. One is that we maintain network slices on a per-user basis, not on a per-service basis. Such high-resolution of network slices would satisfy various and personal requirements from users. The other is decoupling the process of generating network slices into two subprocess, providing subslices by subslice providers and constructing end-to-end user network slices from the subslices by network slice brokers.We introduce the overall design of UONA and explain its advantages, as well as the research challenges to realize it. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of per-user configuration of network subslice by presenting the preliminary numerical evaluation results.