  Radio access network (RAN) slicing realizes a vision where physical network
resources that belong to a specific infrastructure provider can be shared among
multiple mobile network operators (MNOs). Existing work in this area has
addressed RAN slicing at different levels of network abstractions, but has
often neglected the multitude of tightly intertwined inter-level operations
involved in real-world slicing systems. For this reason, this article discusses
a novel framework for operator-to-waveform 5G RAN slicing. In the proposed
framework, slicing operations are treated holistically, including MNO's
selection of base stations (BSs) and maximum number of users, down to the
waveform-level scheduling of resource blocks. Experimental results show that
the proposed framework provides up to 150% improvement in terms of number of
resource blocks that can be used to enable 5G transmission technologies that
require coordination and synchronization among BSs.
