Inter-Business Orchestration for Resource and Service Provisioning in 5G Network Slicing

The Fifth Generation (5G) networks leverage softwarisation and virtualisation as cornerstones to build cost-effective and flexible infrastructures and services. Mean-while, the advanced orchestrator is entailed to manage and orchestrate the resources and services at various levels of infrastructures, including the physical layer, virtualisation layer, service layer etc. The challenges become more evident when the multiple business roles, enabled by the various levels of operations in this new business model paradigm, are taken into account in an integrated operational environment. This paper proposes a new layered, inter-business vertical orchestration architecture to address the highlighted challenges in softwarised and virtualised 5G networks. The architecture distinguishes not only the infrastructure levels but also the business roles, both in an integrated framework with interactions among them specified. It is noted that the proposed vertical orchestration architecture is compatible with network slice orchestration in 5G networks. The proposed orchestration framework is prototyped in a testbed with realistic 5G infrastructures, and its performance is empirically evaluated focusing on the service creation time 5G Key Performance Indicator (KPI).