Characterizing the Effects of Base Station Variable Capacity on 5G Network Slicing Performance

Network slicing is a technique based on virtualization of base station resources that allows to divide the network into logical parts (slices). In 5G, traffic with very heterogeneous transmission requirements is expected, which will need to be transmitted efficiently over a common infrastructure. Data transmission using the millimeter range is planned, which is quite sensitive to blockages. Due to the fact that the channel can be unstable, it is important to investigate resource allocation policies taking into account the variable capacity of the base station. In this work, we focus on to such an aspect of network modeling as the abstraction of the base station resource, which depends on the communication channel state. Quite often, it is presented by researchers in the form of a constant value of the data transfer rate in some units. However, in reality, the behavior of the channel is complex and this value is changing. We explore our resource allocation scheme among slices through simulation. We characterize the effect of the variable capacity of the base station on the stability of the network slicing technology and present numerical results in the second half of the article. We conclude that the variable capacity requires a careful choice of the re-slicing frequency. This can be achieved by invoking re-slicing in timely manner, upon arrival of sessions, or by choosing an appropriate interval. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.