Admission Control in Intent-based Network Slices for the Smart Grid Usecase

The mission-critical operations of smart distribution grids necessitate highly reliable and low-latency communication to ensure uninterrupted electricity distribution with high security of supply. The 5G networks (and beyond), will provide a diverse range of services for various customers, network operators, and verticals. This is enabled by the flexibility provided by increased softwarization and virtualization of the networks, including network slicing. In an intent-based network, the tenants can express the desired outcome of a communication service using intents at an abstract level. Due to the highly dynamic nature of communication service requests, it is very challenging for the network provider to make the trade-off between accepting or rejecting a request while allocating resources to meet the tenants' expectations as defined by the service level objectives. In this paper, we implemented a discrete event simulation, including a two-tier admission control mechanism for service requests. The simulation results compare four admission control policies upon the arrival of service requests into the network-sliced environment and provide interesting parameters, such as the probability of violating a service level objective, which implies a breach of the service level agreement. Our findings in the paper highlight the importance of priority enforcement, two-tier admission control, and resource reserving strategies to meet the desired objectives of mission-critical traffic in smart distribution grid protection.