Healthcare 4.0: Requirements and Challenges for E2E Slicing & Orchestration

The evolution from beyond 5G to 6G networks has envisioned the adoption of various healthcare 4.0 applications, including telemedicine, e-Health, robotic surgery, and many more. These applications require stringent KPIs, including ultra-low latency, massive device connectivity, reliability, and robust security, which are not feasible in the traditional network architecture. The softwarisation of networks by SDN and NFV has enabled the logical partitioning of the physical infrastructure across the RAN, CN, and TN domains as an
E2E network slice for user-specific services, which are tailored, isolated, managed, and orchestrated across virtual networks using Zero-Touch Management (ZTM). This paper presents the KPI requirements for healthcare 4.0 use cases, a brief survey on recent AL/ML-based slicing and orchestration frameworks,
and then discusses challenges and future research directions for automated healthcare network slices. It also discusses open research directions towards ZTM of slices, including semantic intent translation specific to domains, cross-domain observability of QoS, AI-enabled closed-loop assurance, and the integration of
emerging 6G enablers. It aims to guide the healthcare services in a scalable, flexible, secure, and dynamic way over mobile networks.