An Inter-slice Management Solution for Future Virtualization-Based 5G Systems.

Future 5G systems are envisioned to provide communication services to a large catalogue of heterogeneous applications. Then, in order to support services with so different requirements, the concept of network slicing was proposed. In network slicing, network resources are packed and assigned to users according to their needs in an isolated manner. Although different technological solutions may be employed to create slices, virtualization techniques are probably the most promising ones. With this approach, functional data components are configured as virtual network functions and most intra-slice and inter-slice management functionalities are covered by native instruments from virtualization technologies. In the intra-slice domain, algorithms to divide virtual functions into efficient groups are needed. In the inter-slice domain, solutions to address and coordinate global events affecting the entire mobile network are required. Therefore, this paper proposes an inter-slice management mechanism to control events in 5G systems. The solution is based on queue and graph theory, to avoid the network congestion and manage all events in the fastest manner. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, an experimental validation based on simulation scenarios was carried out.