USLICE: Simplified Slicing to Enable Intelligent Network O&M

At AI Net World Congress 2021 in Shenzhen, China, Tao Wenqiang, Chief Planning Engineer of IP Product for ZTE Corporation, a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the mobile internet, proposed the simplified transport network slicing solution USLICE to flexibly support hard and soft slicing, and automatically select different solutions according to service requirements. The object, he said, was to address the problems of low-level automation and complicated deployments of network slicing solutions.

Network slicing is the operators’ best answer on how to build and manage a network, that meets and exceeds the emerging requirements from a wide range of users. The way to achieve a sliced network is to transform it into a set of logical networks on top of a shared infrastructure. Each logical network is designed to serve a defined business purpose and comprises of all the required network resources, configured and connected end-to-end.

ZTE CloudStudio (GSO)

Currently, the network slicing solutions, divided into hard and soft slicing, have been applied into the diversified services of industry verticals. Hard slicing solutions shows their weaknesses in high costs, limited number of supported slices and low-level automation. Some soft slicing solutions have problems of complicated deployment and network slicing life cycle management. ZTE’s USLICE solution aims at solving the above sore points.

Featuring simplified control plane, wider scenarios, flexible service coverage and excellent compatibility with IGP Flex-Algo, the USLICE can make up for the shortcomings of the traditional slicing solution, such as incapability of control layer sharing, slow slicing deployment and cross-domain connection,

added Mr. Tao.

The solution supports L2/L3 interfaces to greatly extend the application scenarios, and is compatible with all existing slicing technologies like IGP Flex-Algo to offer good network interoperability.

Also, it can flexibly meet multi-vendor networking scenarios, and allow efficient control & management of mass slices and fast deployment of end-to-end 5G ToB slices, remarkably simplifying the network and helping operators quickly enter industry vertical markets.

Author: Tim Cole
Image Credit: ZTE

Source: https://www.smart-industry.net/uslice-simplified-slicing-to-enable-intelligent-network-om/