Quality of service driven hierarchical resource allocation for network slicing-enabled hybrid wireless–wireline access networks

Hybrid wireless–wireline access networks (HWWANs), which allow coordinated and simultaneous use of wireless and wireline interfaces, are a promising network architecture for achieving more coverage, better reliability, and higher throughput, particularly for underserved wireline networks. Existing resource management schemes lack the flexibility and scalability to cope with the dynamic traffic fluctuations from users with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. Moreover, these schemes lack resource isolation capability and are incompatible with the HWWAN architecture. This paper proposes a hierarchical radio resource allocation framework for a network slicing-enabled HWWAN, which consists of an upper inter-slice layer and a lower intra-slice layer. Firstly, an inter-slice radio resource allocation problem is formulated to maximize the aggregate network throughput by allocating a pool of resource blocks among the slices, subject to slice-specific QoS requirements. An efficient, low-complexity, demand-oriented greedy resource allocation algorithm is then developed to solve this problem. Secondly, an intra-slice radio resource allocation problem is formulated to maximize the total throughput of individual slices by reallocating the resource blocks secured by individual slices in the upper inter-slice layer to their respective users, subject to their QoS requirements. This problem is decomposed into two smaller sub-problems and solved using convex optimization. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other baseline schemes in terms of average throughput, fairness, and customer satisfaction rate, thereby providing service providers with a flexible and efficient resource allocation solution in the era of next-generation fixed mobile convergence.