A Survey of Mobility Management as a Service in Real-Time Inter/Intra Slice Control

• Main Authors: Noor A. Mohammedali, Triantafyllos Kanakis, Michael Opoku Agyeman, Ali Al-Sherbaz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: 5G slicing; future network; inter-slice; intra-slice; M-MaaS; NFV
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9416648/

In-network softwarization, Network Slicing provides scalability and flexibility through various services such as Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) to cover the network demands. For the QoS, a set of policies must be considered in real-time, accompanied by a group of functions and services to guarantee the end-user needs based on network demand. On the other hand, for the QoE, the service’s performance needs to be improved to bring an efficient service to cover the demands of the end-user. The 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) defined the slice as a component of resources used to process a set of packets. These resources need to be flexible, which means the resources can be scaled up or down based on the demand. This survey discusses softwarization and virtualization techniques, considering how to implement the slices for future networks. Specifically, we discuss current advances concerning the functionality and architecture of the 5G network. Therefore, the paper critically evaluates recent research and systems related to mobility management as a service in real-time inter/intra slice control by considering the strengths and limitations of these contributions to identify the research gaps and possible research directions for emerging research and development opportunities. Moreover, we extend our review by considering the slice types and their numbers based on the 3GPP Technical Specification (3GPP TS). The study presented in this paper identifies open issues and research directions that reveal that mobility management at a service level with inter/intra slice management techniques has strong potential in future networks and requires further investigation from the research community to exploit its benefits fully.