Enhancing the ns-3 5G-LENA Simulator with Capabilities for Flexible and Dynamic RAN Slicing Scenarios

Abstract

Network slicing is a key mechanism of 5G and beyond networks that enables the virtual partitioning of the physical network infrastructure into multiple logical network slices, towards concurrently supporting a wide variety of services with different requirements. The impact of network slicing and of the associated orchestration of network resources across slices are essential aspects that must be considered when simulating many important service provision scenarios relevant to 5G+ networks. However, currently available network simulators lack support for network slicing, the omission being most intense with respect to Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing. Towards filling this gap, we present an enhancement that adds RAN slicing capabilities to the ns-3 5G-LENA simulator. The enhanced simulator can be flexibly configured to run scenarios involving an arbitrary number of slices, each of which uses a fraction of the total amount of radio resources. The values of these fractions can be updated during the simulation run, thus providing the basis for building simulation programs for the assessment of dynamic resource orchestration schemes. Moreover, the slices in the enhanced ns-3 5G-LENA operate in a functionally isolated manner and may even employ different policies for scheduling their own radio resources to their users. We discuss the architectural and algorithmic modifications that were required for introducing RAN slicing in ns-3 5G-LENA and present simulation results that demonstrate the capabilities of the enhanced simulator.