Network slicing, another OSS activity

One business customer, for example, may require ultra-reliable services, whereas other business customers may need ultra-high-bandwidth communication or extremely low latency. The 5G network needs to be designed to be able to offer a different mix of capabilities to meet all these diverse requirements at the same time.
From a functional point of view, the most logical approach is to build a set of dedicated networks each adapted to serve one type of business customer. These dedicated networks would permit the implementation of tailor-made functionality and network operation specific to the needs of each business customer, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach as witnessed in the current and previous mobile generations which would not be economically viable.
A much more efficient approach is to operate multiple dedicated networks on a common platform: this is effectively what “network slicing” allows. Network slicing is the embodiment of the concept of running multiple logical networks as virtually independent business operations on a common physical infrastructure in an efficient and economical way.
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GSMA’s Introduction to Network Slicing.

Engineering a network is one of compromises. There are many different optimisation levers to pull to engineer a set of network characteristics. In the traditional network, it was a case of pulling all the levers to find a middle-ground set of characteristics that supported all their service offerings.

QoS striping of traffic allowed for a level of differentiation of traffic handling, but the underlying network was still a balancing act of settings. Network virtualisation offers new opportunities. It allows unique segmentation via virtual networks, where each can be optimised for the specific use-cases of that network slice.

For years, I’ve been posing the concept of telco offerings being like electricity networks – that we don’t need so many service variants. I should note that this analogy is not quite right. We do have a few different types of “electricity” such as highly available (health monitoring), high-bandwidth (content streaming), extremely low latency (rapid reaction scenarios such as real-time sensor networks), etc.

Now what do we need to implement and manage all these network slices?? Oh that’s right, OSS! It’s our OSS that will help to efficiently coordinate all the slicing and dicing that’s coming our way… to optimise all the levers across all the different network slices!

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