Dynamic and Quality-aware Network Slice Management in 5G Testbeds

Abstract

The proliferation of 5G technology is enabling vertical industries to improve their day-to-day operations by leveraging enhanced Quality of Service (QoS). One of the key enablers for such 5G performance is network slicing, which allows telco operators to logically split the network into various virtualized networks, whose configuration and thus performance can be tailored to verticals and their low-latency and high throughput requirements. However, given the end-to-end perspective of 5G ecosystems where slicing needs to be applied on all network segments, including radio, edge, transport, and core, managing the deployment of slices is becoming excessively demanding. There are also various verticals with strict requirements that need to be fulfilled. Thus, in this paper, we focus on the solution for dynamic and quality-aware network slice management and orchestration, which is simultaneously orchestrating network slices that are deployed on top of the three 5G testbeds built for transport and logistics use cases. The slice orchestration system is dynamically interacting with the testbeds, while at the same time monitoring the real-time performance of allocated slices, which is triggering decisions to either allocate new slices or reconfigure the existing ones. In this paper, we illustrate the scenarios where dynamic provisioning of slices is required in one of the testbeds while taking into account specific latency/throughput/location requirements coming from the verticals and their end users.