SLA Management Procedures in 5G Slicing-based Systems

As is the case for Web services and Cloud services, network slices that are marketed and provisioned in an automated manner need to be accompanied by a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) and the respective platform components, which manage and verify the SLA contents. However, the system complexity of 5G slicing solutions introduces new challenges for the SLA management and verification lifecycle, which are mainly related to the existence of multiple layers (e.g., access vs core network, physical vs virtual infrastructure) and the variability of the definitions and computation methods of high-level Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters (e.g., availability) in the case of slicing. This paper revises the SLA management-related models and workflows for the case of 5G slicing, focusing on the idea of adaptive QoS parameter computation formulas and flexible mappings of low-level metrics to high-level parameters. The proposed SLA management solution is implemented as part of a 5G slicing platform and evaluated in order to show how it manages higher system complexity without adding significant delays in the identification of SLA violations, with its typical overhead being between 0% and 5%, and its max overhead not exceeding 20% in the tested scenarios.