LTE as a Service: Leveraging NFV for Realising Dynamic 5G Network Slicing

Advances in virtualisation technology have reached the mobile networking domain. Network Functions Virtualisation Management and Orchestration (NFV MANO) as proposed by ETSI and realised via Opensource MANO (OSM) allows sharing or partitioning a fairly generic pool of hardware into virtual compute, network and storage resources among differentiated services. A direct consequence of this is a dramatic reduction in CAPEX/OPEX, but also the possibility of instantaneously deploy network services across one or several Mobile Network Operators' (MNO) infrastructure. This work demonstrates how the upcoming fifth generation (5G) of mobile communications envisions NFV MANO for instantiating network services, including Core Network components, and wireless SDN controllers for enforcing end-to-end QoS policies via network slices that span from the radio access segment to the backend packet network.