MAnagement of Radio Access neTwork slicing witH multi-applicatiON concurrency(MARATHON)

MARATHON is a 6 months Experiment, under the Innovative Experiments category, within the 2 nd 5GINFIRE Open Call for Experiments. The main technical objective of 5GinFIRE project is to build and operate an open and extensible 5G NFV-based reference (Open5G-NFV) ecosystem of experimental facilities that not only integrates existing FIRE facilities with new vertical- specific ones, but also lays down the foundations for instantiating fully softwarized architectures of vertical industries and experimenting with them. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732497.

In alignment with the overall project objectives 5GINFIRE is organising a competitive open call targeting external organisations, including industry, SMEs, research institutions, and academia, interested in performing experiments on the top of the infrastructure provided by 5GinFIRE.

In that context, the MARATHON (MAnagement of Radio Access neTwork slicing witH multi- applicatiON concurrency) experiment was conceived to investigate the practical implementation and management of network slicing in 5G systems. The experiment has been performed on top of the Wireless Network Slicing Functionality for 5G (WINS_5G) testbed platform provided by 5GinFIRE. The WINS_5G platform, located at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), counts with capabilities for Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) virtualisation, referred to as Hypervisor for Software Defined Radios (HyDRA). A central result of the MARATHON experiment has been the design, implementation and integration within the WINS_5G platform of a new component, called Radio Slicing Management Function (RSMF), that extends the HyDRA capabilities with a radio slicing provisioning solution that allows experimenters to dynamically create, modify and release radio slices based on pre-defined templates.

The main goal of the MARATHON experiment has been the design and development of the RSMF intended to extend the WINS_5G platform with new radio slicing management capabilities by leveraging the HyDRA technology. This enables the flexible and dynamic provisioning of network slices of the radio access part, denoted as radio slices (RSs), according to users and applications’ requirements, and the enforcement of different strategies with regard to how radio resources are allocated to the RSs based on the desired trade-off between spectrum efficiency and level of isolation between the slices.

The MARATHON experiment has delivered a new RSMF component that extends the WINS_5G platform with radio slicing management capabilities. NS and VNF descriptors have been produced to allow the instantiation of the experiment through the OSM servers of the 5GinFIRE portal, using the developed image, VNFs and NS.

The RSMF provides a tool for future researchers to experiment with the management of RSs as part of the whole network slicing functionality. The developed RSMF allows testing different radio resources allocation strategies like fixed or flexible radio channelization per RS.