Recent Developments in Service Function Chaining (SFC) and Network Slicing in Backhaul and Metro Networks in Support of 5G

In this invited paper we examine the role of Service Function Chaining (SFC) and Network Slicing in providing support for emerging 5G services as data is carried across backhaul and metro networks.The way in which backhaul and metro networks are managed and operated affects the ability of those networks to support a wide range of services that will be enabled by 5G connectivity. Those services will place exacting demands on the bandwidth, delay bounds, and jitter delivered to users, but may vary significantly over relatively short time periods. SFC and Network Slicing offer opportunities for software-driven coordination of network resources to marshal them so as to best deliver the network behaviour that will support the demands of the services.We present the latest proposals towards standardisation of SFC and Network Slicing in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and discuss how these concepts are applied in optical networks through the Metro-Haul project.