Automated Service Provisioning and Hierarchical SLA Management in 5G Systems

Empowered by network softwarization, 5G systems have become the key enabler to foster the digital transformation of the vertical industries by expanding the scope of traditional mobile networks and enriching the network service offerings. To make this a reality, we propose an automation solution for vertical services provisioning and hierarchical Service Level Agreement (SLA) management. Service scaling is one of the most essential operations to adapt the service deployments and resource allocations to ensure SLA fulfilment. Three different scaling levels are addressed in this work: application-, service-and resource-level. We have implemented our solution in a proof-of-concept of a virtualized mobile network platform, spanning over three geographically-distributed sites. To evaluate our solution, we leverage field tests, focusing on automotive vertical services comprising a mission-critical application (collision-avoidance) and an entertainment one (video streaming). The results demonstrate the excellent performance of our solution, and its ability to automatically deploy vertical services and ensure their SLAs through different levels of service scaling.© 2021 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