Random Access for Network Slicing

Network slicing is an emerging paradigm for the architecture of the upcoming 5G mobile networks. One of the features enabled by network slicing is the isolation between different network slices which can guarantee that one slice would not be interrupted by congestion in other slices. Although data channel isolation has been investigated in the literature, the technique for realizing the isolation of control channel has not been discussed adequately. In this paper, the isolation of uplink random access (RA) channel will be studied, and a novel scheme will be proposed to support efficient network slicing for RA procedures in which the different requirements of multiple slices and the characteristics of their traffics are considered. The success probability of the proposed scheme is analytically analyzed and simulated, which shows that, compared to the conventional random access scheme in which all users share the same set of RA preambles and the physical isolation scheme which assigns orthogonal RA preamble subsets to different slices, the proposed scheme can achieve efficient isolation between slices as well as efficient resource utility.