Strategic Network Slicing Management in Radio Access Networks

Network slicing might radically change the relations among different actors of the telecommunications ecosystem, where new players, active in different markets, could benefit of tailored connectivity services based on different business strategies. We argue that for fully exploiting the opportunities offered by network slicing, dynamic sharing of resources is crucial not only for efficiency and cost savings, but also for enabling a resource negotiation that can unleash the potential of new business relations. We develop an automated mechanism that allows tenants to take strategic decisions to optimize the management of their slices based on their instantaneous demands and model their interaction as in marketplace. We integrate our solution, based on game theory, on a 3GPP calibrated system level simulator, where a slice-aware scheduler enforces the tenants' decisions at the Nash Equilibrium (NE). We compare our proposal with a static baseline, that assigns a fixed share of resources to each slice, and show that, by dynamically trading resources in the market, tenants achieve lower costs, and, therefore, higher profits. We provide an algorithmic implementation that guarantees the convergence to a single NE and test the computational complexity of our algorithm to an increasing number of slices in the system.