5G Network Slicing Enabling Edge Services

Network slicing already plays an important role as a critical enabler in the current 5G technology domain. 5G aims to disrupt and accelerate innovation in various vertical fields, among those is the vehicular industry. In the detailed scope of the 5G-DRIVE research project promoting cooperation between the EU and China, a set of trials is to be undertaken towards promoting 5G growth. In this paper, initially, we identify a variety of challenges arising from the 5G convergence to the automotive industry. Then we describe the specific innovative framework of the 5G-DRIVE research, together with a novel network slicing mechanism deployed at the edge. Then an analysis on the corresponding architectures is presented, and how they operate in a set of trials for new 5G services. The services described are a virtualized caching network function (vCache), and a deep packet inspection one (vDPI), which are deployed at the edge facilitating an edge 5G service. For each case, the services are deployed and evaluated in the 5G Drive platform using the Katana slicing framework. Additional analysis of the OSM slicing platform is presented. The results demonstrate the performance of a network slicing mechanism for 5G service deployments in an edge enabled platform.