designing new mechanisms to improve spectrum efficiency, meet different key Radio Access Network Slicing and Virtualization for 5G Vertical Industries, First Edition. Edited by Lei Zhang, Arman Farhang, Gang Feng, and Oluwakayode Onireti. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 12 Service-Oriented RAN Support of Network Slicing performance indicators (KPIs) for different vertical services, and bring sufficient incentives toward service providers to use slicing, becomes an essential and challenging issue. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. The general concept and principles of network slicing are presented in Section 12.2. In Section 12.3, we describe RAN subsystem deployment scenarios. Then, we propose key technologies to enable service-oriented RAN slicing in Section 12.4. Finally, Section 12.5 concludes this chapter. General Concept and Principles Before we introduce the RAN subsystem concept, a whole picture of end-to-end slicing is shown. Network slicing is an end-to-end concept, which always includes RAN slicing and CN slicing [6], although from a larger perspective end-to-end slicing includes terminal, RAN, transport network (TN) and CN, as well as a data center (DC) domain that hosts third-party applications from vertical industries (see Figure 12.1). This section aims to clarify the definition of slicing concepts, such as network slicing, slice instance, slice type, and their corresponding relationships. Then, we will present the overall RAN subsystem and focus on key principles that apply for support of network slicing in RAN subsystems. ((()) Network slice instance A Network slice instance B (((-))) ((-)) Edge DC Core DC Terminal Access network Transport network Core network Third-party APP Common infrastructure Figure 12.1 End-to-end network slicing. 12.2 General Concept and Principles 12.2.1 Network Slicing Concepts In this section, we will introduce the basic concepts related to network slicing as follows [6,7]: Network slicing: this is the collection of a