How Should Network Slice Instances be Provided to Multiple Use Cases of a Single Vertical Industry?

There are a large number of vertical industries implementing multiple use cases, each use case characterized by diverging service, network, and connectivity requirements such as automobile, manufacturing, power grid, etc. Such heterogeneity cannot be effectively managed and efficiently mapped onto a single type of network slice instance (NSI). Thus the tailored provisioning of an end-to-end network slicing solution to a vertical industry that consists of multiple use cases is a critical issue, which motivates this article, aimed at exploring this never-addressed and challenging research problem by proposing the Use-case Specific Network Slicing and the SubNetwork Slicing concepts that enable the provisioning of Use-case-specific NSI(US-NSI) and GeNeric NSI(GN-NSI), respectively. Both approaches tackle the same technical issue of provisioning, management, and orchestration of per vertical per use case NSIs in order to improve resource allocation and enhance network performance. The article also presents the architectural frameworks for managing US-NSI and GN-NSI, which extend the service deployment concept and system architecture of network slicing for vertical customers of fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks.