D3.4 Slice Management (Release B)
Creators: name: 5Genesis
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: 5GENESIS builds an experimentation facility that is accommodating experimenters to run validations and experiments on top of a 5G infrastructure. One of the prominent capabilities of the 5G technology is the ability to create network slices to satisfy the diverse requirements of each deployed vertical use case over the same infrastructure. This deliverable discusses and details the evolution of design, specifications and implementation of the 5GENESIS Network Slice Manager and more specifically the Release B of the software. The slice manager is the component that manages the creation and provision of network slices over the infrastructure and is the binding element between the 5GENESIS Coordination layer and the actual infrastructure and management and orchestration layer. The Slice Manager receives the network slice template from the Coordination Layer and then provisions the slice, deploys the network services, configures all the physical and virtual elements of the slice and finally activates the end-to-end operation. The document discusses directly the evolutions, deltas and newly introduced components, acknowledging the fact the Deliverable 3.1 is still valid for the reader to check the use cases, requirements and the background that lead to this particular design. The newly introduced components tackle three different functionalities were needed i.e. i) the internal communication between the components, that is tackled by the implementation of the message bus; ii) per slice and overall slice monitoring exporting tackled by the Prometheus node exporter and grafana dashboard implementation and iii) the capability for slice reconfiguration by policies exposed by the slice optimisation component. The next part of the document, discusses the enhcancements that were implemented in a series of components contributing to the overall stability of the Slice Manager. These enhancements include, the Northbound API, the slice lifecycle management, the slice mapping and monitoring, and the adaptation layer for the communication with the MANO elements. Moreover the document discusses the new features that are available in this release as a concequence of the aforementioned enhancements. We are highlighting the ability to support concurrent slicing besides slice monitoring and optimisation as already mentioned. Special mention has to be made to the full support of CI/CD pipelines both for the development and for the deployment of the Slice Manager, allowing faster adoption by the community, even for standalone usage outside 5GENESIS ecosystem and initial purpose. This section is vital for the architecture definition and the first Release of the software. The Slice Manager architecture is exploiting microservices approach with all the communications between the components to be realised through a message bus. The design results in a high degree of modularity and expandability and can be easily enhanced with further improvements (i.e. high availability, health monitoring, new southbound drivers etc). Furthermore, the functionalities and purpose of the northbound interfaces of the slice manager (NBI) are documented, providing information wrt their implementation. The aforementioned interfaces are supporting REST APIs and swagger documentation is available along with the software release. In this context the GSMA Generic Slice Template that is supported is discussed in this document. Finally the document provides a quick walkthrough of Slice Manager workflow for installation, configuration and Slice lifecycle operations.