Radio Access Network Slicing Strategies at Spectrum Planning Level in 5G and Beyond

The new fifth generation (5G) era has transformed previous mobile generations into fast, smart networks that will be more responsive and customizable. With network slicing, 5G networks can be dynamically adapted to the different needs of specific vertical industries. This capability has opened the opportunity to new business models whereby infrastructure owners can monetize their investment by leasing resources to third parties (i.e. tenants). In this respect, a challenging task for the owner of the radio access network infrastructure (i.e. the network provider) is the spectrum planning of multi-tenant scenarios. This paper proposes different alternatives of hiring capacity to the provider as well as a set of spectrum planning strategies, each giving a certain degree of flexibility to allocate resources per tenant. These strategies are evaluated in a 5G small cell multi-tenant network through snapshot-based simulations. The performance of the strategies is assessed in terms of scalability, spectrum isolation, utilization and efficiency.