On 23 January 2018, the 1st SliceNet Advisory Board Meeting took place in Sophia Antipolis, France. The purpose of the meeting was to present the plans and results of the project to the Advisory Board members and get their feedback.
The Advisory Board Members
The seven participating Advisory Board members included (see photo, from left to right): Michael Fitch, BT; Linus Thrybom, ABB Corporate Research; Toon Norp, TNO; Marco Liebsch, NEC Network Laboratories Europe; Rui Aguiar, University of Aveiro; Jane Zheng, Ulster University; and Klaus Martiny, Deutsche Telekom AG. They brought a wide diversity of expertise and perspectives to the meeting, from network management to vertical sector application in the energy sector and the healthcare domain.
Eight more Advisory Board members didn’t manage to fit the meeting into their busy schedules: Pål Grønsund, Telenor; Valentin Voinica, City of Alba Lulia Municipality; Dimitra Simeonidou, University of Bristol; Oscar Lazaro, Innovalia Association; Pascal Bisson, Thales Services; Anand R. Prasad, NEC; Jim Leahy, OGCIO; and João Peças Lopes, INESC | FEUP.
Topics discussed
After a project overview by project coordinator Maria Barros from Eurescom and a presentation on SliceNet’s technical vision by Qi Wang from the University of the West of Scotland (UWS), the participants discussed the definition of slices and the project’s overall approach to network slicing.
In the second part of the meeting, more detailed presentations from the work packages led to a productive exchange on concrete activities of the project.
The presentation by Pedro Miguel Neves from Altice Labs on SliceNet’s overall architecture was followed by a summary of use cases by Ana Cristina Aleixo from infrastructure service provider EFACEC. Dean Lorenz from IBM Vision explained their concept for intelligent/cognitive network management, and finally, Rui Calé from Altice Labs presented SliceNet’s plans and activities for contributing to standardisation. Advice on the latter point was particularly concrete, as two of the participating Advisory Board members are leading standardisation groups – Toon Norp is chairing the 3GPP SA1 and Klaus Martiny the new ETSI working group ZSM.
The project consortium will now follow up on the numerous productive comments by the Advisory Board members and come back to them with further questions. In order to get also the opinions of the Advisory Board members who could not participate this time, the project team will organise the next Advisory Board meeting as a Web conference in Q2/2018.