Patent ID: 11943660
Assignee: DISH WIRELESS L.L.C.
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 4:
5. A method, comprising:
maintaining a plurality of load thresholds for each network slice of a plurality of network slices, wherein:
each network slice of each respective set of network slices comprises of a set of virtual network resources and network traffic flows associated with the network slice and represents an independent virtualized instance of a network defined by allocation of a subset of available network resources a cellular telecommunication network;
each network slice of the plurality of network slices is supported by a respective user plane function (UPF) of a plurality of UPFs in a cellular telecommunication network;
the plurality of UPFs serve as anchor points between user equipment (UE) in the cellular telecommunication network and a data network (DN);
each UPF of the plurality of UPFs is a virtual network function responsible for interconnecting packet data unit (PDU) sessions between the user equipment (UE) and the DN by anchoring the PDU sessions on individual UPFs;
the plurality of load thresholds for each network slice depend on a respective capacity of each network slice and total capacity of each UPF supporting each network slice to have PDU sessions anchored thereon; and
an amount of load put on a network slice by a UE appearing in the cellular telecommunication network is assumed to be identical for all UEs appearing in the cellular telecommunication network;

receiving a request to anchor on a UPF a PDU session of a new UE newly appearing on the cellular telecommunication network;
selecting a network slice of the plurality of network slices on which to anchor the PDU session based on a location of the new UE and determined load-regions for each network slice of the plurality of network slices defined by the plurality of load thresholds;
anchoring the PDU session of the new UE to the selected network slice and the respective UPF supporting the selected network slice;
generating a lowing load-region indicating a current network slice load less that a first threshold percentage of network slice capacity;
generating one or more intermediate non-overlapping load-regions each defined by respective lower and upper threshold percentages of network slice capacity and indicating a current load greater than the lowest load-region; and
generating a highest load-region indicating a current network slice load greater than a second threshold percentage of network slice capacity and greater than the one or more intermediate non-overlapping load-regions.