Rate-delay analysis of radio access network slices

Based on wireless network virtualization, radio access network (RAN) slicing is developed to provide services for the different users' requirements. Moreover, the users' sum data rate and delay are two significant metrics to guarantee quality of services. In this paper, we first establish an optimization problem to maximize the downlink sum rate while guaranteeing users' delay for RAN slices, where the base stations and user equipments are randomly distributed. Then we analyze the performance tradeoff between the sum rate maximization and delay tolerance. With the aid of Lyapunov optimization, the upper bounds of the achievable rate and delay are derived, through which the existence of tradeoff in performance is obvious and verified by numerical results.