Hierarchical edge cloud enabling network slicing for 5G optical fronthaul

Network slicing has been proposed as an innovative concept to partition a physical network into different configurable slices, thereby allowing the network to meet the diverse requirements of expected services in the 5G era. Existing network-slicing schemes focus almost exclusively on the partitioning of the core network or the radio access network. However, to achieve greater flexibility and better resource utilization in service provisioning, the potential of network slicing in the 5G optical mobile fronthaul (MFH) network should be jointly exploited. To address this challenge, we propose a flexible hierarchical edge cloud architecture to enable 5G optical MFH network slicing. Additionally, a corresponding integrated network resource management scheme is proposed to support various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements and diverse resource requests of the network slices. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme is able to jointly allocate the bandwidth resources to network slices and realize cloud-computing offloading to meet various QoS requirements, and therefore reduce the fronthaul bandwidth burden.