Access control and handoff policy design for RAN slicing

Network slicing (NS) has been identified as one of the most promising architectural technologies for future mobile network systems to meet the extremely diversified service requirements of users. In radio access networks (RAN) slicing, service provisioning for slice users becomes much more complicated than that in traditional mobile networks, as the constraints of both user physical association with base station (BS) and logical association with NS should be considered. In other words, the user-BS-NS three layer association relationship should be addressed in provisioning tailored service for diversified use cases with various quality of service (QoS) requirements. Therefore, user association (including handoff scheme) in RAN slicing becomes an essential yet challenging issue for 5G-and-beyond systems. In this chapter, we propose to solve two fundamental problems: user access control and mobile user handoff policy design for RAN slicing to achieve satisfactory QoS of users.