A wifi-slicing MANO solution to enable elastic wifi-sharing communication service end-to-end provision

Abstract

This work sets out by examining the principle that WiFi-sharing home-premises hotspots can significantly expand the wireless broadband communication capacities of 5th Generation (5G) networks, which is critical for both Ultra-Dense Networking (UDN) and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency (URLL) use cases. However, current WiFi-sharing deployments (e.g., the FON pioneer carrier) push to the hotspot's owner the task of manually configuring his physical Consumer Premises Equipment (pCPEs) to fix a slowdown in WiFi connectivity or even connection breaks. Since most of them lack minimum networking expertise, this stands as a critical weakness. To tackle this issue, we introduce the WiFi-Slicing Management and Orchestration (WS-MANO) solution to automatically provision, in a carrier-grade manner, elastic WiFi-sharing communication services atop WiFi-Slice-defined domains. The WS-MANO harnesses Software-Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technologies to autoscale WiFi-Slices to keep Quality of Experience (QoE). A real testbed-premised proof of concept provided evidence around the feasibility and effectiveness of WS-MANO in provisioning elastic WiFi-Slices while keeping users to perceive affordable QoE at the same time.