An Extensible Network Slicing Framework for Satellite Integration into 5G
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For the past decades, networks have evolved to increase their performances, their capacities, to reduce latencies and optimize their resource management in order to remain competitive and adapted to the market. Today, the way consumers use networks has changed and more heterogeneous services with their own requirements have emerged. This has led network operators to define the network slicing paradigm. Network slicing creates multiple partitions in the network, each partition can be dedicated to a particular service allowing vertical markets and multiple services with different requirements to run on top of a single infrastructure. To allow the flexibility level required by network slicing, satellite technologies have to evolve. Satcoms actors have therefore been working on improving satellite equipments. Testbeds followed the theoretical analysis and ESA's current project SATis5 is making it its core topic. The work presented in the full-paper of this extend abstract is the next step we propose to those initiatives. It focuses on the network slicing concept applied to satellite networks which, we believe, is a mandatory requirement for a full integrated satellite into 5G networks. We first start by describing the main challenges associated to the satellite slice definition. We then highlight a set of requirements for such a satellite slice. Based on those requirements, we construct and propose a complete Satellite Slice as a Service (S3) framework which mutualizes the satellite infrastructure to provide a seamless integration into 5G networks.
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