Real-time maintenance of latency-sensitive 5G services through network slicing

Network Slicing appears as one of the enabling technologies for 5G networks to accommodate services with different requirements and availability. The present work seizes the use of network slicing and focuses on the deployment and maintenance of services which are sensitive to latency constraints. For this purpose, the design and use of a VNF latency sensor are presented, considering its aggregation to the internal chain of services and the retrieval of latency data from the sensor. In this way, and by making use of such data, the expected service performance can be guaranteed. A multi-level orchestration and control architecture is then introduced to provide all the required functionalities for this mechanism. In order to assess this method experimentally, an emulated multi-segment testbed, considering specific 5G network segments (i.e., Access, Metro and Core), is used. The experimental results demonstrate the correct latency sensing of a particular slice and the process of service maintenance through the triggering of proper network actuations such as path reconfiguration or slice reallocation.