Last week during the EuCNC2018 conference in Ljubljana, SliceNet were involved in a number of activities, including the SliceNet exhibition stand, complete with demonstration, four workshops, a panel discussion and two poster sessions. Two videos were also released introducing SliceNet and slicing. The exhibition stand included a demonstration of “RAN Runtime Slicing System” using a RAN and CN prototype with a novel plug and play network application to show multi-service programmability on a per slice basis.
The 5GPPP Software Network WG hosted Workshop 2 ‘’From cloud ready to cloud native transformation: What it means and Why it matters’. The workshop was co-organised by Orange Romania, represented by Cristian Patachia, the co-chair of the 5G-PPP SoftNet WG. Another SliceNet participant, Marius Iordache of Orange Romania presented in Session 2 “Future network transformation. 5G cloud architectures”. https://www.eucnc.eu/workshops/workshop-2/.
Workshop 3 was titled “Multi-provider, multi-vendor, multi-player orchestration: from distributed cloud to edge and fog environments in 5G”. https://www.eucnc.eu/workshops/workshop-3/. At the workshop, SliceNet’s Technical Co-Manager Qi Wang of UWS, presented a talk entitled “Multi-domain network slicing for vertical businesses in 5G”, jointly prepared by SliceNet’s partners the University of the West of Scotland and RedZinc. In this talk, he presented a general multi-domain view and the SliceNet approach to multi-domain network slicing informed by use cases’ requirements collected from vertical industries. Furthermore, he explained an end-to-end inter-domain network slicing vision. Multi-domain considerations are important towards achieving true end-to-end network slicing across various domains of different ownerships (network operators/service providers, verticals etc.) and technologies and this talk helped to clarify the vision and technical approaches.
Workshop 8 was on “Next generation network systems security” https://www.eucnc.eu/workshops/workshop-8/. The presentation was given by SliceNet technical coordinator Qi Wang of UWS on “Security considerations in 5G network slicing”. This presentation was jointly prepared by SliceNet’s partners DellEMC and the University of the West of Scotland. Qi highlighted some key security management issues in 5G network slicing systems and emphasized both the design and run-time security considerations in SliceNet. In particular, SliceNet’s Slice Security Manager was introduced. This enables the coordination of security mechanisms related to the provisioning and operation of secure network slices, considering end-to-end encryption, management of virtual security network functions, and potential cognitive analytics etc. Security is one of the top concerns in virtualised and software networking-based 5G networks, such as network slicing based 5G systems.
The workshops were well attended and several questions were raised by the audience to trigger interactive discussions. The discussions indicate that both well-defined multi-domain and security management technologies are crucial to realize real-world, highly usable services based on network slicing. In particular, when the two scenarios are combined together, multi-domain security is a huge challenge yet to be addressed.
Navid Nikaein, Eurecom represented SliceNet on a Panel “Network Slicing: Real-world Opportunities with Open Standards and Open Source”. This panel presented the mid-term real-world opportunities for operators bringing network slicing offerings to the market as well as the feedback from the end customers. The panel discussed items that are key for the next phases of standardization as well as the road blocks that are still in place. The panel info can be found at : https://www.eucnc.eu/panels-2/ and a video of the whole panel discussion here : https://youtu.be/Tm8tih26-9U
SliceNet’s Coordinator, Maria Weiss, and Technical Manager, Qi Wang, presented two posters related to the project short-papers in the conference proceedings. One of the posters, titled “SliceNet: Enabling 5G use cases for vertical businesses” like the paper, presented the project’s use-cases and their requirements. The second poster, titled “SliceNet: E2E Cognitive Network Slicing and Slice Management in 5G Networks”, described SliceNet’s architecture. The session was well attended with not enough time for the interesting discussions around each of the papers. The session was also a good opportunity to promote visits to the demo at the exhibition booth.
Finally, two introductory SliceNet videos were presented at EuCNC on the 5GPPP stand and on the SliceNet stand as well as on both the 5G PPP website and the SliceNet website . The first video shows an interview between SliceNet participant Jeanne Caffrey, RedZinc and SliceNet Project Co-Coordinators Maria Barros and Anastasius Gavras and the second an animated video introduction to Slicing and the SliceNet Project.