Contributions to the ITU-T Focus Group on Network 2030

LOGOThe ITU-T has recently started a Focus Group on Network 2030 and during the first week of November, two events were organized to bootstrap the FG activities, an initial workshop, and the first FG meeting.

See the official web page for more information and a motivating slide deck on the vision towards 2030 by the FG chairman, Dr. Richard Li.

Prof. Christian contributed to the workshop programme with the presentation entitled “Deep Slicing and Loops in a Loop: Multi-Tenancy and Smart Closed-Loop Control Gone Wild“. attended by around 70 people.


This talk shares a vision on some key characteristics and features of networks in 10+ years from now. We will discuss how the concept of slicing –so much hyped these days– may be only at the tip of the iceberg if we consider how deep network slicing can go, taking multi-tenancy to an extreme. Today`s telecom infrastructure take timid approaches to sharing infrastructure assets (energy, space, hardware, etc.). As the history of multiplexing gains keeps proving, we shall expect deeper approaches to any-layer resource sharing, from virtualized infrastructures to applications and network functions in slicing operational modes where multi-tenancy goes wild. Such deep slicing vision is deep on both the vertical (multi-layer) aspect as well as horizontal (end-to-end and multi-domain) realms. We will present some exemplary approaches to this end. Furthermore, deeps slicing takes Customer-Provider recursivity to an extreme and is characterized by unprecedented tenant-controlled operations, where slice tenant have the choice on the network protocol stack and actual software instances under its responsibility.

During the first official FG meeting, up to 16 input contributions were discussed in addition to the organization and workflows of the FG for the first year. As a partial contribution incoming from the NECOS project, Prof. Christian presented Input contribution NET2030-I-006, joint work with Luis M. Contreras and Alex Galis.

The purpose of this input document is to call attention to the gaps and fragmentation of standardization of network slicing and put end-to-end multi-domain network slicing into the FG2030 agenda. After introducing the vision and reviewing the challenges of “deep slicing”, i.e., taking multi-tenancy to new dimensions in the end-to-end protocol stacks and multi-domain and customer-provider relationships, we conclude with a call for action to focus on the network and cloud network slicing challenges to enable the deployability of expected NETWORK 2030 innovative facilities.

 

 

 

 

 

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