1st International Workshop on Slicing in end-to-end Networks including Wireless: Orchestration & Management – SliceWoman 2019
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1st International Workshop on Slicing in end-to-end Networks including Wireless: Orchestration & Management – SliceWoman 2019

The continuous evolution of the application layer requires more versatile communications infrastructures, with dynamic behaviors and additional constraints on the underlying protocols. Of course, the network needs to meet the connectivity and QoS requirements, but it also needs great flexibility and dynamicity to answer application services and third-party actors’ demands. The trend, accompanied by the emergence of 5G use-cases, is such that application services and network users (enterprise, carriers, service providers, end users...) have dynamically changing needs in terms of network services and resources. Users have differentiated behaviors and event-related usages. As devices become network agnostic, they also expect ubiquitous access to services, from any device, via any network at any time. In addition to enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services, 5G will cover smart cities and vertical markets and its design needs to meet the requirements of massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC), characterized by a very large density of connected objects and Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), characterized by stringent requirements in terms of low latency and high availability and reliability.

To meet all these demands and such variations, both network architectures and communication service infrastructures are undergoing a major transformation towards flexible, dynamic, and easy-to-manage network architectures where the boundaries between IT, Cloud and network are disappearing in favor of capabilities provided “as-a-Service". The adoption of virtualization, then softwarization for networks and infrastructures is an opportunity to move from monolithic network solutions to customized end-to-end network services conceived on-demand and deployed dynamically and “on-the-fly".

An important objective of network slicing is going beyond resource sharing and consumption reduction, providing flexible mechanisms for network service provisioning, supported by novel deployment models, while ensuring smooth service continuity and automating the management and orchestration of network services and resources.
Henceforth, to ensure sustainable network transformations, network architectures are “re-imagined” as network platforms, in a way that third-party actors can have a self-service and open access view to network systems, services, and capabilities.
However, slicing approaches are still at their infancy and multiple issues are yet to be addressed. For example, slicing of the Radio Access Network (RAN) raises specific issues as real-time requirements of low-layer network functions make their virtualization difficult and reduce slicing flexibility. Indeed, while core and access network slicing is constrained by existing mechanisms, it can be facilitated by new approaches which are the focus of this workshop.
New aspects such as Slice-as-a-Service, VIM on-demand, WIM on-demand, RAN-as-a-Service, runtime allocation of data center and network elements bring a series of challenges in the way network services and slices are conceived, deployed, provided and intelligently managed.

Sponsorship

The workshop is technically sponsored by the EU-Brazil NECOS (Novel Enablers for Cloud Slicing) project: http://www.h2020-necos.eu.