From Concept to Reality: QoS-Based RAN Slicing in Next Generation O-RAN Networks

Service-oriented networks are gaining significant attention recently, giving rise to concepts such as network slicing within the research community. Network slicing involves partitioning the network into distinct and logically isolated segments, each customised to cater to specific services or use cases. The concept of slicing became more feasible with the emergence of the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN), which aims to reduce RAN complexity by facilitating programmability and employing an automated control system via the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). This paper presents a near real time application (xApp) that runs on the RIC, designed to implement a Quality of Service (QoS)-based dynamic RAN slicing module for real-world scenarios. This slicing module assigns a downlink target throughput to each slice. It then dynamically adjusts the share of Physical Resource Blocks allocated to each slice, ensuring efficient resource utilisation and meeting Service Level Agreement requirements. The obtained results indicate that the instantiated slices can readily meet their designated target throughput in accordance with their predetermined priority.