NSFaaS: Network Slice Federation as a Service in Cloud-Native 5G and Beyond Mobile Networks

Network slicing has emerged as a revolutionary solution to fifth generation (5G) network design and operation. However, the inherent mobility of the end users introduces important new and unexplored challenges with regard to the network slice continuity across different administrative domains (i.e., networks controlled by different operators). In this paper, we introduce Network Slice Federation as a Service (NSFaaS), a novel cloud-native orchestration framework for network slice federation that incorporates well-defined interfaces to exchange federated service and slice resource templates among operators. The proposed framework is fully compliant with existing standards on network slicing and operator federations. In addition, we have designed and deployed a cloud-native federated 5G experimental platform to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework and assess its performance in terms of “post-federation” slice creation.