Closed loop optimization of 5G network slices

Abstract

With 5G, the telecommunication industry is promising higher connectivity and tailor made quality of service. The underpinning technology behind these promises is Network Slicing. Slicing allows applications having widely disparate requirements such as low latency, high bandwidth, high reliability etc. to co-exist on the same network infrastructure. 5G Slicing is facilitated by a Management and Orchestration (MANO) framework that handles its lifecycle through Day 0 operations of planning, Day 1 operations of deployment and Day 2 operations of assurance. In our demo, we present an end-to-end 5G Slicing lifecycle MANO framework, which in addition to the typical MANO functionalities, performs optimal deployment of slices and intelligent slice monitoring and assurance. We evaluate our MANO framework on IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation (CP4NA) for a closed-loop fault detection and remediation scenario and show mean time to detect of 14.7s and mean remediation time of 15s.