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
Abstract
Empowered by <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">network softwarization</i> , 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 <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">automation</i> solution for vertical services provisioning and hierarchical Service Level Agreement (SLA) management. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Service scaling</i> 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 <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">automotive vertical services</i> 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.