Service-Aware Maximum Likelihood-Based Network Slicing for Live Low-Latency Streaming

Network slicing (NS) is a promising solution for media services, such as live streaming in telecom networks. NS enables customised network conditions for different applications and requirements. This customisation granularity is further enhanced through the use of 5G Quality of Service (QoS) flows for intra-slice management. Given the fact that network slices are becoming more dedicated to specific services' quality requirements, it becomes important to find service-aware NS methods that guarantee service quality while minimising resource consumption. To this end, this paper presents a Maximum Likelihood-based Network Slicing (MaxLiNS) method that minimises resource consumption with guaranteed Quality of Experience (QoE) for live low-latency streaming service under playback buffer level estimation and control. We evaluated the MaxLiNS method against existing service-agnostic and emerging service-aware NS methods on our End-to-End (E2E) 5G testbed. The results show that the MaxLiNS outperforms existing NS methods in terms of quality guarantee and resource consumption minimisation.