Automated Service Provisioning and Hierarchical SLA Management in 5G Systems
Xi Li, Carla Fabiana Chiasserini, Josep Mangues‐Bafalluy, Jorge Baranda, Giada Landi, Barbara Martini, Xavier Costa‐Pérez, Corrado Puligheddu, Luca Valcarenghi · IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2021
Empowered bynetwork 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 anautomationsolution for vertical services provisioning and hierarchical Service Level Agreement (SLA) management.Service scalingis 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 onautomotive vertical servicescomprising 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.