Towards End-to-End Application Slicing in Multi-access Edge Computing systems: Architecture Discussion and Proof-of-Concept

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel architecture for end-to-end application slicing in 5G networks with MEC integration, including a proof-of-concept implementation and performance validation.

Contribution

It introduces a new slicing architecture that manages and orchestrates slice segments across all domains, including MEC, addressing key gaps in current solutions.

Findings

Feasibility of the proposed architecture demonstrated through performance tests

Effective management of slice segments across multiple domains shown

Proof-of-concept implementation validates the approach's practicality

Abstract

Network slicing is one of the most critical 5G pillars. It allows for sharing a 5G infrastructure among different tenants leading to improved service customisation and increased operators' revenues. Concurrently, introducing the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) into 5G to support time-critical applications raises the need to integrate this distributed computing infrastructure to the 5G network slicing framework. Indeed, end-to-end latency guarantees require the end-to-end management of slice resources. For this purpose, after discussing the main gaps in the state-of-the-art with regards to such an objective, we propose a novel slicing architecture that enables the management and orchestration of slice segments that span over all the domains of an end-to-end application service, including the MEC. We also show how this general management architecture can be instantiated into a multi-tenant MEC infrastructure. A preliminary implementation of the proposed architecture focusing on the MEC domain is also provided, together with performance tests to validate the feasibility and efficacy of our design approach.