A practical approach to slicing Wi-Fi RANs in future 5G networks

To deliver on the vision of network slicing, future 5G networks will have to provide virtualization and isolation for a variety of Radio Access Network (RAN) technologies. In this paper we study how to implement RAN slicing in Wi-Fi networks. In particular, we present a scheduling algorithm that allocates airtime through a set of virtual Wi-Fi interfaces executing on the same or different physical radios, in order to fulfill each tenant’s Service Level Agreement. We demonstrate a practical implementation of our scheduler on Linux systems based on the mac80211 driver that contrary to other existing solutions is independent from underlying hardware drivers. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the performance of our scheme through a set of realistic experiments.