Automating Vertical Services Deployments over the 5GT Platform

This article presents a system for 5G networks that makes it possible to meet the diverse needs of vertical industries simultaneously sharing the same physical infrastructure. Orchestration, network slicing, edge computing, and federation are key technologies enabling industry verticals to have their own virtual networks, which might require aggregating transport networking and computing fabric, from the edge up to the core and cloud. Three novel building blocks are defined to meet these challenges in an automated manner: a vertical slicer as the entry point to create services and request slices, a service orchestrator to manage the services and decide their placement and allocation of required resources, and a mobile transport and computing platform virtualizing infrastructure networking and computing resources in an integrated manner. An experimental evaluation of the developed system shows its feasibility and confirms some of the benefits expected.