Towards the quest for 5G Network Slicing

Abstract

The imminent arrival of 5G will drive changes in communications service provider networks, leveraging on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. The upcoming 5G ecosystem will address vertical markets to give rise to a plethora of novel services with different requirements, such as Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC), machine Massive Type Communications (mMTC), and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB). To be able to offer such variety of services with different needs over the same network infrastructure, this latter should be split into multiple logical networks known as network slices. In this paper, we propose an architecture design for 5G network slicing inspired by ONF and 3GPP models. We provide and analyse our experiment results of instantiating multiple networks slices with our scalable 4G/5G VNFs in a Network Slice as a Service (NSaaS) approach on a real platform.