5G System Design

8Network Slicing

Alexandros Kaloxylos¹, Christian Mannweiler², Gerd Zimmermann³, Marco Di Girolamo⁴, Patrick Marsch⁵, Jakob Belschner³, Anna Tzanakaki⁶, Riccardo Trivisonno⁷, Ömer Bulakçı⁷, Panagiotis Spapis⁷, Peter Rost², Paul Arnold³ and Navid Nikaein⁸

¹ University of Peloponnese, Greece

² Nokia Bell Labs, Germany

³ Deutsche Telekom AG, Technology Innovation, Germany

⁴ Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Italy

⁵ Nokia, Poland (now Deutsche Bahn, Germany)

⁶ National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and University of Bristol, UK

⁷ Huawei German Research Center, Germany

⁸ EURECOM, France

8.1 Introduction

The 5^th generation (5G) network is promising to upgrade not only the well‐known mobile broadband services, but also enable the support of services for the so called “vertical industries” (e.g., health, transportation, factories, energy). An extensive list of 5G use cases can be found in Chapter 2. All these verticals have their own requirements and needs which may be highly divergent. Their operational requirements are translated into different key performance indicators (KPIs) such as user experienced data rate, end‐to‐end (E2E) latency, reliability, communication efficiency, availability, and energy consumption. These have to be satisfied in specific environments characterized by different parameters such as mobility, expected data traffic, density and types of network nodes, position accuracy, etc.

As discussed in Section 5.2.2, network slicing is introduced as one of the key enablers ...