Closing in on 5G Control Apps: Enabling Multiservice Programmability in a Disaggregated Radio Access Network

Network slicing is one of the key enablers in providing the required flexibility for realizing the service- oriented fifth-generation (5G) vision and achieving the desired levels of isolation and sharing spanning multiple subnets, i.e., the core network (CN), transport network, and radio access network (RAN). In this article, we highlight the design elements of a proposed RAN runtime slicing system to enable flexible slice customization on top of disaggregated RAN infrastructures.