ProSLICE: An Open RAN-based approach to Programmable RAN Slicing

The increasing popularity of programmable wireless networks has led to efforts by both academia as well as industry to redesign access networks based on the disaggregated Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) concept. However, the absence of a development platform for prototyping O-RAN use cases and the perceived complexity of the O-RAN specification have led to a stagnation of systems research efforts in this domain with a disproportionate focus on monolithic RAN architectures. With a view to overcoming these challenges, this paper introduces the ProSLICE platform, a full-scale realization of the complete O-RAN specification based on purely open source components along with several enhancements and extensions for fine-grained network control and ease of use. Key contributions include a fully disaggregated O-RAN-compliant RAN, a custom O-RAN service model in support of network slicing, statistics and configuration applications for the O-RAN RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), and a comprehensive use case-based performance evaluation.