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Top1. Introduction
With the continuous development of mobile Internet, Internet of things as well as many new network services and applications, such as high-definition video, virtual reality, online gaming, cloud services and so on, future 5G mobile networks will meet various challenges from the perspective of network architecture and key technologies (Gupta et al., 2015; Panwar et al., 2015). In order to flexibly, efficiently and cost-effectively provide customized services for various business scenarios in 5G network, network slicing has been proposed (Alliance, 2015; Ericsson, 2015; Zhou et al, 2016). By using the virtualization technology (Rost et al., 2015; Costa-Requena et al., 2015; Hawilo et al., 2014; Yousaf et al., 2013), a single physical network infrastructure can be abstracted and sliced multiple virtual dedicated networks, which can not only provide end-to-end network services on demand and support various use cases (e.g. smartphones, autonomous driving, massive Internet of Things and so on), but also save capital expenses (CapEx) and operation expenses (OpEx) for infrastructure providers.
Based on the advantage features of network slicing in 5G network, the problem of resource sharing for network slicing in multi-tenant scenario has been widely studied in recent years (Rost et al., 2016; Feng et al., 2015; Zhu et al., 2015; Jiang et al., 2016; An et al., 2016). On the other hand, with the extensive study of another new technology named information-centric networking (ICN) (Xylomenos et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2014), in-network caching has been considered as a promising technology in 5G network (Wang et al., 2014; Abboud et al., 2015; Poularakis et al., 2016; Hu et al., 2016) to reduce the duplicate content transmission in networks and improve Quality of Experience (QoE) of end-users.
Although some excellent works have been done on network slicing and in-network caching in 5G network, to the best of our knowledge, these two important issues have traditionally been addressed separately in the literature. Through virtualization technology, physical storage resource can be abstracted as virtual caching resource pool. And the infrastructure provider (InP) can build the caching resource slicing according to the tenant requirements. Hence, it is significant to jointly consider these two advanced techniques together to improve the QoE of end-users and the utilization of caching resource in 5G networks.
In this paper, involving in-network caching feature in network slicing, we propose a caching resource sharing scheme for network slicing in 5G core network in order to improve the caching resource utilization and the end-to-end system performance. We consider a multi-tenant scenario under resource constraints, and multiple tenants of network slicing compete for caching resource in 5G core network, so as to maximize the utility of each tenant. The main contributions of this paper are listed as follows: