Inter-Slice Mobility Management in 5G: Motivations, Standard Principles, Challenges and Research Directions

Mobility management in a sliced 5G network introduces new and complex challenges. In a network-sliced environment, user mobility has to be managed among not only different base stations or access technologies but also different slices. Managing user mobility among slices, or inter-slice mobility, motivates the need for new solutions. This article, presented as a tutorial, focuses on the problem of inter-slice mobility from the perspective of 3GPP standards for 5G. It provides a detailed overview of the relevant 3GPP standard principles. Accordingly, key technical gaps, challenges, and corresponding research directions are identified toward achieving seamless inter-slice mobility within the current 3GPP network slicing framework

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

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