Towards Enabling Performance-Guaranteed Slice Management and Orchestration in 6G.

Next-generation network services (e.g., XR, mobile hologram, digital twin) often expect both latency and bandwidth guarantees. In the 5G network, network slicing techniques that enable the isolated management of multiple virtual networks are devised for ensuring quality-of-service (QoS). However, existing network slicing frameworks are inherently insufficient to provide guaranteed performance to those new network services. Even with ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), low-level performance pertaining to the delivery of radio frames or packets rather than service-level performance has only been dealt with, although there exists a large gap between them. The discrepancy comes from the fact that none of those services runs based on the packets. They run based on their own application data units (ADUs) whose size is dynamic and mostly much larger than just a packet. In this regard, in order to directly guarantee the service-level performance, we propose a new slice management and orchestration framework that can make the time duration to complete the transmission (i.e., completion time) of variable ADUs over fluctuating wireless channels constant through two techniques leveraging the knowledge of ADUs: a time budget orchestration and a radio resource management for ADU completion. We provide detailed specifications of our framework.