Abstract

The emerging services of 5G and beyond (5G/B5G) have imposed challenging resiliency demands that make reliable slicing in radio access networks (RAN) an imperative concern. In previous literature, service protection schemes for one single domain are well studied, e.g., lightpath protection for transport domain. However, 5G/B5G will evolve towards a converged network where data transport and function processing coordinate together, thus the single-domain protection is inadequate. In this paper, we are dedicated to investigating a multi-domain protection scheme, which can achieve customized protection for specific reliability demands and reduce backup redundancy. To this end, we propose a topology-level based protection scheme (TLPS) to customize virtual networks (VN) for slices to guarantee reliability while reducing redundancy. The designed VNs are then embedded onto the substrate network with our proposed mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and heuristic, which aim at minimizing processing and transport resources. We also introduce the multi-service function chain (MSFC) scheme for comparison, which is extended from the existing “Primary + Backup” solution. In the simulation, different cases are numerically evaluated where TLPS outperforms MSFC in terms of processing and transport resource consumption. Our analyses can provide insights into achieving customized protection for RAN slicing in 5G and beyond.