The Slice Controller

Overview

A Slice is an aggregated set of resources that can be used in the context of an end-to-end networked service comprised of virtual network functions. Slices are composed of multiple resources which are isolated from other slices and allows logically isolated network partitions, with a slice being considered as the basic unit of programmability using network, computation and storage. When considering the wide variety of application domains to be supported by 5G network, it is necessary extend the concept of slicing to cover a wider range of use cases than those targeted by the current SDN/NFV technologies.

If we have slicing everywhere, including networks and DCs, we observe the following attributes:

In order to support service provisioning over these slices, it is necessary to have mechanisms to support the slicing of the network resources and the Data Center compute and storage resources. To manifest this slice approach, we have designed a built a DC Slice Controller which is able to allocate a slice of a DC and create a per-slice VIM in an on-demand fashion. The DC slice and the VIM are provisioned soley for use with the service. Each slice and its associated VIM are independent of the other slices and VIMs. In this way, customers will never share servers, and the worry of VMs of one customer interacting or spying on another customer will be eliminated. Also, the issue of one customer's VM consuming all the resources and starving other customer's VMs is also ameliorated to some extent.

Each of these slices will be allocated and de-allocated in an on-demand fashion. A customer can interact with a Slice Manager, and request a new slice. The resulting slice will be isolated from the other slices. Furthermore, each slice will get its own VIM or NIM, and not have management as part of shared one. The following figure presents how the resources of a DC are isolated from each other, and how a Slice Manager is involved in such a process.

Figure 1 - Network Slicing in the DC

Slice Controller Elements

The Slice Controller has the following elements for its operation:

Slice Controller Code

Licence

The Slice Controller is distrbiuted under the GPL licence.

Source

You can download the source