Modeling Network Slice as a Service in a Multi-Vendor 5G Experimentation Ecosystem

As the 5G standards mature and awareness of the capabilities of the technology increases, industry verticals are becoming more eager to test new services and develop them to the level of maturity required for market adoption. Consequently, there is a growing urgency to provide a realistic 5G test and experimentation platform that is open to verticals and which supports rapid and agile testing of real-world use cases. The realism implies having a distributed multi-domain infrastructure, involving technologies and solutions from different vendors. This paper provides insights on how to allow advanced vertical experimentation in a trial end-to-end 5G facility with the above features, using Network Slice-as-a-Service for this end. Among other enablers, this includes the design of reusable, model-based service templates, their publication into a service catalog, and the exposure of open APIs towards the verticals supporting functions for creating, modifying and decommissioning network slices. All these mechanisms will be presented in this paper, based on the experience gained in the 5G-VINNI funded project.