SLA-Aware Traffic Steering in Hybrid TN-NTN 5G Backhaul: A Potential Game Approach

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Navidan, Hojjat, Rico, Delia, Cheraghinia, Mohammad, Moerman, Ingrid, Shahid, Adnan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866910258475040768
author Navidan, Hojjat
Rico, Delia
Cheraghinia, Mohammad
Moerman, Ingrid
Shahid, Adnan
author_facet Navidan, Hojjat
Rico, Delia
Cheraghinia, Mohammad
Moerman, Ingrid
Shahid, Adnan
contents The integration of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) with Terrestrial Networks (TN) is a key enabler for resilient 5G-Advanced and future 6G backhaul infrastructures. However, managing traffic across these highly asymmetric links remains a significant routing challenge, as systems must support heterogeneous network slices with conflicting service-level agreements (SLAs) while selectively utilizing costly NTN resources. This paper presents a computationally lightweight SLA-aware traffic-steering framework for a hybrid TN-NTN backhaul that models the load-balancing problem as an exact potential game. This mathematical foundation inherently enables decentralized coordination between uplink and downlink load-balancing agents without control-message overhead. By formulating traffic steering as a coupled optimization problem, per-slice (or per-user group) traffic fractions are dynamically distributed across terrestrial and satellite paths based on utility functions that capture throughput, latency, packet loss, and SLA penalties. The resulting game admits a pure Nash equilibrium, ensuring stable and predictable traffic adaptation under non-stationary load conditions. The framework is evaluated on a geographically distributed 5G testbed, using bidirectional traffic generated for five representative slices. Experimental results show that the proposed controller significantly outperforms heuristic and conventional baselines, reducing SLA violations to 1.7% for V2X and 0.7% for the emergency slice while completely eliminating them for video, IoT, and best-effort traffic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_26673
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SLA-Aware Traffic Steering in Hybrid TN-NTN 5G Backhaul: A Potential Game Approach
Navidan, Hojjat
Rico, Delia
Cheraghinia, Mohammad
Moerman, Ingrid
Shahid, Adnan
Networking and Internet Architecture
The integration of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) with Terrestrial Networks (TN) is a key enabler for resilient 5G-Advanced and future 6G backhaul infrastructures. However, managing traffic across these highly asymmetric links remains a significant routing challenge, as systems must support heterogeneous network slices with conflicting service-level agreements (SLAs) while selectively utilizing costly NTN resources. This paper presents a computationally lightweight SLA-aware traffic-steering framework for a hybrid TN-NTN backhaul that models the load-balancing problem as an exact potential game. This mathematical foundation inherently enables decentralized coordination between uplink and downlink load-balancing agents without control-message overhead. By formulating traffic steering as a coupled optimization problem, per-slice (or per-user group) traffic fractions are dynamically distributed across terrestrial and satellite paths based on utility functions that capture throughput, latency, packet loss, and SLA penalties. The resulting game admits a pure Nash equilibrium, ensuring stable and predictable traffic adaptation under non-stationary load conditions. The framework is evaluated on a geographically distributed 5G testbed, using bidirectional traffic generated for five representative slices. Experimental results show that the proposed controller significantly outperforms heuristic and conventional baselines, reducing SLA violations to 1.7% for V2X and 0.7% for the emergency slice while completely eliminating them for video, IoT, and best-effort traffic.
title SLA-Aware Traffic Steering in Hybrid TN-NTN 5G Backhaul: A Potential Game Approach
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26673