Experimenting with open source tools to deploy a multi-service and multi-slice mobile network

Abstract

With network slicing, the infrastructure is divided into separate networks, each one customized to provide a specific service. Network slicing is a key technology to efficiently support services with very diverse requirements, such as the ones that should support 5G networks. While the architectural work for 5G is well advanced, and many theoretical solutions that address diverse aspects such as resource assignment or service composition exist, the experimental work lags behind. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by describing our implementation experiences when deploying a small-scale multi-service prototype. We consider a video streaming service and an augmented reality service, each one provided over a different network slice, and extend existing open-source software solutions for a better provision of them. Our implementation showcases key features of future 5G networks, such as radio slicing with service differentiation, support for local breakout, or multi-slice orchestration with QoE-triggered optimization. With the core of our implementation being open-source, we believe that our results will prove very useful to researchers and practitioners working on this area of research.