Towards Cross-Slice Communication for Enhanced Service Delivery at the Network Edge

The increasing resource demand and diversity of network services is taken under serious consideration by the various stakeholders, driving the architecture design of 5G (and beyond) networks. Network slicing, as a prominent aspect of next-generation network architectures, aims at satisfying the diverse service requirements in terms of throughput, latency, reliability, and/or security. However, the prevailing way of slice provisioning, i.e., in the form of isolated bundles of computing, storage, and network resources, makes cross-slice communication inefficient, especially at the network edge. This inevitably hinders opportunities for Business-to-Business (B2B) synergies at the event of service co-location. In this paper, we study this novel aspect of network slicing, i.e., cross-slice communication (CSC). We particularly promote a form of optimized CSC, at which two co-located slices can establish peering in a secure and controlled manner, by confining peering traffic within the boundaries of the datacenter, while still preserving the important aspect of resource isolation. Such optimized CSC can foster synergies between service providers without additional latency or traffic in the backhaul/transport network. In this context, we investigate various ways to establish optimized CSC at edge computing infrastructures, based on functionalities offered by state-of-the-art management and orchestration (MANO) frameworks, such as OpenSourceMANO.