How Should Network Slice Instances Be Provided to Multiple Use Cases of a Single Vertical Industry?

There are a large number of vertical industries implementing multiple use cases, each use case characterized by diverging service, network, and connectivity requirements -- including automobile, manufacturing, power grid, and others. Such heterogeneity cannot be effectively managed and efficiently mapped onto a single type of network slice instance (NSI). Thus, the tailored provisioning of an end-to-end network slicing solution to a vertical industry that consists of multiple use cases is a critical issue, which motivates this article, aimed at exploring this never-addressed and challenging research problem by proposing the use case-specific network slicing and sub-network slicing concepts that enable the provisioning of use case-specific NSI (US-NSI) and generic NSI (GN-NSI), respectively. Both approaches tackle the same technical issue of provisioning, management, and orchestration of per-vertical per-use-case NSIs in order to improve resource allocation and enhance network performance. The article also presents the architectural frameworks for managing US-NSI and GN-NSI, which extend the service deployment concept and system architecture of network slicing for vertical customers of 5G mobile networks.