Mission Critical Communications Support With 5G and Network Slicing

Mission Critical (MC) communications take a pivotal role to achieve effective Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) actions. Even though 3GPP standards define MC applications and services in an architectural framework compatible with current 5G mobile networks, real-life experiments and applications of these concepts are still at the very beginning. In this paper, we present an architectural study and related experimental activity on network slicing for MC communications. We implemented these services in a fully virtualized environment, and deployed and tested them in a multi-domain network slicing scenario compliant with the ETSI NFV-MANO specifications. Our work aligns with the 5G approach separating control and data planes. The level of automation in service deployment and the slice isolation features are demonstrated, showing the benefits in terms of application performance, management flexibility, scalability, and quality of service differentiation capabilities.