5G-TRANSFORMER: Slicing and Orchestrating Transport Networks for Industry Verticals

This article dives into the design of the next generation mobile transport networks to simultaneously support the needs of various vertical industries with diverse range of networking and computing requirements. Network slicing has emerged as the most promising approach to address this challenge by enabling per-slice management of virtualized resources. We aim to bring the network slicing paradigm into mobile transport networks by provisioning and managing slices tailored to the needs of different vertical industries. Our technical approach is twofold: (i) enabling vertical industries to meet their service requirements within customized slices; and (ii) aggregating and federating transport networking and computing fabric, from the edge up to the core and cloud, to create and manage slices throughout a federated virtualized infrastructure. The main focus of the article is on major technical highlights of vertical-oriented slicing mechanisms for 5G mobile networks.© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works