The network slicing concept of 5G aims to provide the flexibility and scalability required to support a wide array of vertical services. To coordinate the coexistence of network slices, and to guarantee that the required resources are available for each one of them, the 5G core employs a slicing management entity, a slice manager. In this paper, we propose an architecture where the network slicing concept is extended beyond the core and access networks to also include the configuration of the UE’s network stack.We exploit the slice manager’s global view on the network to feed fine-grained information on slice configuration, health, and status to the UE. This information, together with local policies on the UE, is then used to dynamically create services tailored to the requirements of individual applications. We implement this architecture in a 5G testbed, and show how it can be leveraged in order to enable optimized services through dynamic network protocol configuration, application-to-slice mapping, and network protocol selection.

5G mobile networks introduce the concept of network slicing, the functionality of creating virtual networks on top of shared physical infrastructure. Such slices can be tailored to various vertical services. A single User Equipment (UE) may be served by multiple network slice instances simultaneously, which opens up the possibility of dynamically steering traffic in response to the specific needs of individual applications - and as a reaction to events inside the network, e.g., network failures. This paper presents the PoLicy-based Architecture for Network Slicing (PLANS). In this policy framework, the network slice management entity in the 5G core and the UE can cooperatively optimize the usage of the available network slices via policy systems installed both inside the network and on the UE. The PLANS architecture has been implemented and evaluated in a 5G testbed. For three different case studies, we show how such a system can be leveraged to provide optimized services and increased robustness against network failures. First, we consider a drone autopilot scenario and we demonstrate how PLANS can reduce network-slice recovery time by more than 90 %. We then study a bulk-transfer scenario and show how PLANS enables a sustained high throughput during a network-slice failure. Finally, for a 360-degree video streaming scenario, we illustrate how PLANS can help prevent video quality degradation due to a network-slice becoming unavailable.

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) enable information to be shared wirelessly between vehicles and infrastructure in order to improve transport safety and efficiency. Delivering C-ITS services using existing cellular networks offers both financial and technological advantages, not least since these networks already offer many of the features needed by C-ITS, and since many vehicles on our roads are already connected to cellular networks. Still, C-ITS pose stringent requirements in terms of availability and latency on the underlying communication system; requirements that will be hard to meet for currently deployed 3G, LTE, and early-generation 5G systems. Through a series of experiments in the MONROE testbed (a cross-national, mobile broadband testbed), the present study demonstrates how cellular multi-access selection algorithms can provide close to 100% availability, and significantly reduce C-ITS transaction times. The study also proposes and evaluates a number of low-complexity, low-overhead single-access selection algorithms, and shows that it is possible to design such solutions so that they offer transaction times and availability levels that rival those of multi-access solutions.