Coordinated Management of 5G Core Slices by MANO and OSS/BSS

To manage and orchestrate Network Slices (NSs) for 5G Core (5GC), the MANO (MANagement and Orchestration) framework is proposed by European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI). In most research testbeds, MANO systems such as Tacker, OSM and ONAP are used to initiate network slices. However, this doesn’t comply with the 3GPP 5G standards as MANO should only be responsible for dynamic management of NSs, and the static management such as provisioning or unprovisioning a network slice should be left to OSS/BSS (Operation/Business Support System). Thus, in our testbed, an integrated architecture was designed in which the management of network slices will be coordinated by both MANO and OSS/BSS. MANO would handle on-boarding, instantiating, scaling and terminating of network slices while OSS/BSS is responsible for static management of slices including provisioning and unprovisioning of network slices. To evaluate our system, it was compared with the management systems equipped with only OSS/BSS or MANO in order to analyze the shortfalls of those systems when used to deploy network slices. Through this analysis, this research confirms the necessity of applying both OSS/BSS and MANO for the coordinated management of 5G core slices as adopted by 3GPP.