Network Slicing for Wireless Networks Operating in a Shared Spectrum Environment

By virtue of being an efficient way to distribute network resources to physical groups of users and to allow the network to provide performance guarantees, network slicing is one of the main features that has been included in 5G wireless networks. Concurrently, 5G networks will improve the spectral efficiency by transmitting over multiple RF bands (carrier aggregation), some potentially shared with other networks. This work presents a novel approach to implement network slicing when a network is sharing some of its spectrum bands with another network, making it first of its kind in addressing network slicing in a spectrum sharing environment. In the proposed technique, graph coloring is used to represent the interference between two networks and to assign spectrum resources to each access. In addition, two mechanisms are introduced to manage interference: "gray zones" and "blurred edges", the latter of which specifically address inter-network interference. Results show that the proposed technique is effectively able to perform resource allocation for network slicing in a shared spectrum environment by meeting throughput requirements for all slices and the isolation of services that is expected from network slicing.