Inter-Slice Mobility Management in 5G: Motivations, Standard Principles, Challenges and Research Directions
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As a prime feature of 5G networks, Network Slicing has opened up several new avenues of research. Mobility management in a network-sliced environment, in particular, introduces new and complex research challenges. In a network-sliced environment, user mobility has to be managed not only among different base stations or access technologies, but also among different slices. This motivates the need for new mobility management solutions, which, by convention, are required to be standards-compliant. This article investigates the problem of inter-slice mobility from the perspective of 3GPP standards for 5G. The existing 3GPP standard procedures only enable users to change (or switch) slices. They lack formal mechanisms for session continuation among slices, and thus need to be enhanced to achieve seamless inter-slice mobility or handovers. In this direction, we identify some open challenges as well as some potential research directions towards developing efficient, comprehensive and 3GPP compliant inter-slice mobility management solutions.
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