Network slicing in 5G: An auction-based model

The 5G mobile network is expected to meet the diverse demands from multiple types of business services. At the same time, some of the 5G use cases come with hard, and often expensive to meet, requirements in terms of latency and bandwidth. It is a common understanding that one system can not fit all and there is a need for customizing network according to the requirements of specific business use cases. Network slicing is introduced to partition the physical network to different slices to be configured for providing different quality of service as requested by the slice' operator and required by the slice' users. Since these slices will be used by the businesses, e.g. verticals, allocating physical resources to the network slices, is not anymore only a matter of performance but also a matter of revenue and business model. In this paper, we address a joint resource and revenue optimization a novel auction based model. Through extensive simulation study, we demonstrate our proposed auction model can allocate network resources to network slices for providing (i) higher satisfaction of requirements per network slice, and (ii) increased network revenue1.