End-to-End Network Slicing: Maximizing 5G Networks’ Capabilities to Cater Different Use Cases

Abstract

Wireless communication networks have gone through years of evolution and development, which will be in continuum to cater the varying needs of users, many of which are still unknown. These diverse requirements and use cases are expected to grow to cause traffic to increase rapidly. For this reason, fifth-generation (5G) technology emerges which could accompany varying demands of multi-tenant networks. 5G communication networks are expected to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) end-to-end (E2E) service deliveries for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. 5G network requires various types of features and networks in terms of mobility, policy control, latency, reliability, etc. and Network slicing is a key concept to address this issue by partitioning the physical network at an end-to-end level to allow optimum grouping of traffic, isolation from other users or tenants, and configuring of resources at a macro level. However, this innovative technology cannot be realized without a paradigm shift from hardware-based to flexible software-defined networks (SDN). This paper introduces the 5G network, its use cases and the concept and benefits of network slicing. State-of-the-art management and orchestration of network slicing are provided in this paper. A piece of brief background information on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) incorporated with Software-Defined Networks is presented with a focus on the aspects that are necessary to understand how to leverage these technologies to implement the network slicing concept.