Service Assurance in 5G Networks: A Study of Joint Monitoring and Analytics

In 5G, network slicing is considered as an important enabler to support various verticals simultaneously, by providing dedicated and isolated slice services over a common infrastructure. Many verticals have specific Service Level Agreement (SLA), which should be guaranteed by mechanisms like service assurance (SA). In 5G, SA is required to collaborate with orchestration and management to automate the slice provisioning process. In this paper, we first propose a hierarchical, distributive, and modular SA architecture to assure the entire slice services from end to end (E2E), based on distributed modules assuring underlying services, functions, and resources. Secondly, a closed loop is formed between assurance and orchestration to enable automation by cooperation between monitoring, analytics, and orchestration. In addition, correlation across layers (infrastructure, network function, network service and E2E slice) is considered to form a closed loop through all layers to further improve efficiency. The joint approach also allows to optimize the tradeoff between the cost and the performance of SA. Simulation results illustratively demonstrate the benefit of the proposed approach.