Automatic Network Slicing for Admission Control, Routing, and Resource Allocation in Underwater Acoustic Communication Systems

Large-scale underwater wireless communications networks are gaining popularity because they are a critical enabler for a variety of applications in the environmental, commercial, and civilian domains. Multiple applications with various service-level-agreement (SLA) requirements can be provided utilizing the same network infrastructure to enable cost-effective underwater (UW) network deployment and maintenance, allowing for globally efficient resource management. Because various stakeholders may have different service level agreements (SLAs), underwater acoustic communication systems (UACS) must provide functional isolation of services. As a result, network slicing is critical in such networks. In this paper, a novel optimization framework for automated network slicing (ANS) in UACS is presented, which enables SLA-based admission control, routing, and dynamic resource allocation. It achieves optimized solutions and improves network performance, decreases deployment costs and simplifies network operation This paradigm is also in line with the development of 5G/6G networks. The proposed automatic slicing framework considers the difficult underwater acoustic channel characteristics to deliver a heuristic sub-optimal routing and resource allocation solution based on the SLA provided/required by network tenants/applications. An in-depth numerical analysis is used to test the suggested solution and compare it to state-of-the-art software-defined networks (SDN) routing and resource allocation algorithms.