Network Slicing for 5G with SDN/NFV: Concepts, Architectures, and Challenges

By J. Ordonez-Lucena, P. Ameigeiras, D. López, J. Ramos-Muñoz, J. Lorca, J. Folgueira. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2017

722 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The fifth generation of mobile communications is anticipated to open up innovation opportunities for new industries such as vertical markets. However, these verticals originate myriad use cases with diverging requirements that future 5G networks have to efficiently support. Network slicing may be a natural solution to simultaneously accommodate, over a common network infrastructure, the wide range of services that vertical- specific use cases will demand. In this article, we present the network slicing concept, with a particular focus on its application to 5G systems. We start by summarizing the key aspects that enable the realization of so-called network slices. Then we give a brief overview on the SDN architecture proposed by the ONF and show that it provides tools to support slicing. We argue that although such architecture paves the way for network slicing implementation, it lacks some essential capabilities that can be supplied by NFV. Hence, we analyze a proposal from ETSI to incorporate the capabilities of SDN into the NFV architecture. Additionally, we present an example scenario that combines SDN and NFV technologies to address the realization of network slices. Finally, we summarize the open research issues with the purpose of motivating new advances in this field.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c61431e479245b1235b30de20aa89ebc188189c

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Citations in the corpus

Survey on Network Slicing for Internet of Things Realization in 5G Networks (2021, background): “The network slicing concept with aspects that support network slicing realisation is discussed in [25].”
Toward Edge Intelligence: Multiaccess Edge Computing for 5G and Internet of Things (2020, background): “Ordonez-Lucena et al. [64] not only presented the network slicing concept but also focused on the application of network slicing to 5G systems in particular.”
A Service-Oriented Deployment Policy of End-to-End Network Slicing Based on Complex Network Theory (2018, methodology): “[6] have presented a deployment example of NS by integrating SDN and NFV.”
5G network slicing using SDN and NFV- A survey of taxonomy, architectures and future challenges (2019, methodology): “[12] Prototype Control and data plane Realization of network slices.”