A communication system is disclosed in which communication resources are dynamically partitioned into a plurality of slices, each slice having at least one associated network-level performance requirement. A network-level performance requirement is translated into cell-level resource requirement(s) for determining, based on the cell-level resource requirement(s), whether to admit a slice instance. When the slice instance is admitted, information identifying the cell-level resource requirement(s) for the slice instance is provided to a scheduler function. The cell-level resource requirement(s) for a given slice instance may be used to determine an associated packet delivery deadline and entitled resource amount before deadline. The scheduler function allocates communication resources to each admitted slice based on an earliest-deadline-first method.