Dynamic Network Slicing for Flexible Radio Access in Tactile Internet.

Tactile Internet (TI) will generate a variety of 5G-enabled use cases with different requirements for latency, throughput and reliability. In this paper, we propose a flexible cloud-based radio access network (FRAN) for TI, where traffic of user equipments (UEs) can be temporary offloaded from the operator-provided networks to user-provided networks if needed. Such a concept enables dynamic network slicing (DNS) where the network architecture is temporally augmented with slices of infrastructure borrowed from user provided network. FRAN is able to support Tactile applications without any basic change to the hardware/software infrastructure in the network. We model DNS system as a two-layer/slice traffic-aware resource allocation framework, where every layer uses a separate two-step matching game in order to serve Tactile users (TUs) and low-priority users (LUs). We propose a subgame Nash stable and two-sided exchange stable concepts as solutions of the proposed two-layer traffic-aware resource allocation. Our numerical results show that network operators and UEs (either TUs or LUs) significantly benefit from deploying the FRAN rather than conventional cloud-based radio access networks (CRANs).