5G network slicing: cross-domain orchestration and management will drive commercialization

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Enterprises rely on communications service providers (CSPs) to supply critical network connectivity in order to conduct their business. Service providers have historically delivered this connectivity with limited flexibility and control, meaning that it is not fit for purpose for new-generation digital enterprises. Enterprises in a range of industries are rapidly accelerating their digital transformation initiatives; these require highly flexible network connectivity services that they can provision on-demand and according to their unique performance requirements. 5G network slicing enables this.

The 5G network (with a programmable transport network, the cloud-native core, new radio and edge clouds) is expected to become the ‘services creation platform’ for next-generation communications. The platform will be used to create separate network partitions (or ‘slices’) with unique network performance and latency characteristics to serve a particular use case or enterprise. A combination of networking technology innovations and enablers such as segment routing and software-defined networking (SDN) in the transport network, and network function virtualisation (NFV) and cloud-native computing (CNC) in the 5G core makes domain-level slicing and end-to-end network slicing possible.