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Large-scale underwater wireless communications networks are gaining interest as they represent a key enabling factor for applications spanning over several domains, such as environmental, commercial and civilian applications. To enable a cost-effective underwater (UW) network deployment and management, multiple applications with different service-level-agreement (SLA) requirements can be served using the same network infrastructure, enabling globally optimized resource management. Since different SLA requirements might belong to different stakeholders, the underwater acoustic communication systems (UACS) must support functional isolation of services. Therefore, network slicing is essential for such networks. In this paper, a novel optimization framework is introduced for automatic network slicing (ANS) of resources for UACS that enables dynamic resource allocation based on the SLAs. It achieves globally optimized solutions, enhances quality of service (QoS), simplifies network operation, and reduces deployment costs. Such paradigm is also compatible with 5G/6G networks. The proposed automatic slicing framework takes into account the challenging underwater acoustic channel characteristics to provide a heuristic sub-optimal routing and resource allocation solution based on the SLA given/required by the stakeholders/applications. Insightful numerical analysis is provided to verify the suggested model and evaluate its flexibility and efficiency. |
