Heuristic Radio Access Network Subslicing with User Clustering and Bandwidth Subpartitioning

In 5G and beyond, the network slicing is a crucial feature that ensures the fulfillment of service requirements. Nevertheless, the impact of the number of slices and slice size on the radio access network (RAN) slice performance has not yet been studied. This research is needed to understand the effects of creating subslices on slice resources to serve slice users and how the performance of RAN slices is affected by the number and size of these subslices. A slice is divided into numbers of subslices of different sizes, and the slice performance is evaluated based on the slice bandwidth utilization and slice goodput. A proposed subslicing algorithm is compared with k-means UE clustering and equal UE grouping. The MATLAB simulation results show that subslicing can improve slice performance. If the slice contains all UEs with a good block error ratio (BLER), then a slice performance improvement of up to 37% can be achieved, and it comes more from the decrease in bandwidth utilization than the increase in goodput. If a slice contains UEs with a poor BLER, then the slice performance can be improved by up to 84%, and it comes only from the goodput increase. The most important criterion in subslicing is the minimum subslice size in terms of resource blocks (RB), which is 73 for a slice that contains all good-BLER UEs. If a slice contains UEs with poor BLER, then the subslice can be smaller.