Mobility Support in Slice-based Network Control for Heterogeneous Environments (MOBISLICE 2020)

Abstract

Network slicing has been standing as one of the key enabling technologies for the upcoming 5th Generation of Telecommunications. Alongside other important technologies, such as NFV, SDN and MEC, its contributions to isolated network provisioning in a more dynamic and flexible way are being pursued in different industry and academia arenas throughout the world. Nonetheless, considering the wide range of foreseen enhanced use cases (not only in scope of 5G but also Beyond-5G), slicing aspects have been mostly targeting either enhancements at the radio level, or the integration of cloud resourcing capabilities for supporting network operation at the core and/or the edge. As such, there is a wide gap related with the impact that such slicing-based procedures will exert over mobility management processes for seamless mobility support while the devices, network or services move both physically (i.e., change their network point of attachment) as well as virtually (i.e., between slices). MOBISLICE (Mobility Support in Slice-based Network Control for Heterogeneous Environments) is a workshop dedicated to this issue, it’s solutions, their deployment and exploitation. This journey began in 2018 as a workshop collocated with IEEE NFV SDN, with the first workshop dedicated to foster the ideas of slice-based designs and technologies in mobile scenarios and assess their impact, proposing solutions and enhancements to their efficient, dynamic and elastic support. In 2019, the second workshop addressed the complexities of applying mobile-enabled slices in different environments, ranging from massive scale machine type communications to full-fledged mobile broadband and others. Finally, in 2020, the latest edition of MOBISLICE III focused on bringing forth first assessments, technical planning and supportive technologies evolutions, for the validation of network slice deployments in real and experimental scenarios within and outside the lab. It took a deep look into on-going research and industrial efforts not only featuring ICT players (e.g., telcos, system providers, vendors) but also verticals (as the network slice consumers), which are pursuing joint technical solutions where the mobility of slices has a presence. Additionally, it addressed the underlying technical innovations and tools over existing experimental infrastructure, to support these real experiments, trials, laboratorial work and scalability models/assessment. It is with great pleasure that we share with you the findings proposed by our authors, extensively reviewed by our panel of experts, certain that the considerations therein will be of great value and contribution to your knowledge in the area.