End to End Service Assurance for 5G Network Slicing and Closed Loop Automation

5G Network Slicing intends to provide tailored networks as per the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of the customer, on a shared or dedicated network infrastructure. Service Assurance (SA) guarantees that these SLAs are met by active and passive monitoring, detection of SLA violations in proactive and reactive manner, and applying corrective actions in a closed loop manner. This paper briefly discusses the network slicing architecture and describes the SA architecture to assure end to end (E2E) network slice service, network subnet slice service and the underlying network infrastructure quality. This paper also highlights the key functions needed, while emphasizing on the real-time monitoring, data analytics capabilities, SA profile management and the hierarchy and relationship of the closed loops across all the layers. Challenges faced by communications service providers (CSP) in realizing closed loop automation is also briefly touched.