P4-NetFPGA-based network slicing solution for 5G MEC architectures

Network Slicing is one of the fundamental capabilities of the new Fifth-generation (5G)networks. It is defined as several logical networks that are created to fulfil specific Quality of Service (QoS)and Quality of Experience (QoE)requirements and are available over the same physical infrastructure. This paper proposes a novel extension to P4-NetFPGA framework to achieve network slicing between different 5G users in the edge-to-core network segment. This solution provides hardware-isolation of the performance in terms of bandwidth, latency and packet loss of 5G network traffic. The work proposed has been validated in a real 5G infrastructure.