I believe that there are plenty of use cases for pre-5G Network slicing, with the caveat however that only fairshared RAN channels or not-shared RAN channels can be used for access to the pre-5G slice instance. It may be useful to differentiate between slice instance instantiation (-and capacity modification) time and slice instance selection time. In pre-5G, slice instance instantiation time is mostly staticly defined by capacity Management processes, but could in theory be made more dynamic. In pre-5G slice instance selection is mainly done by APN, in some use cases also by IMSI range or by IMSI range combined with APN. 5G is just widening up the Options for runtime slice instance selection - in addtition to DNN (the 5G equivalent of an APN) you still have IMSI ranges plus the NSSAI comprising up to 8 S-NSSAI for mapping the access session to a slice instance, plus the option to use the NSSF for making this decision policy based and thus more flexible, upto the Point where a session gets mapped to a different slice instance just because it is a different time of day when the access session is created and because the NSSF contains such a time of day specific policy. For example, such policy could be intended to support drying out a slice instance prior to a planned maintenance window affecting resources used by the slice.instance.
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Lothar Reith
Detecon International
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Original Message:
Sent: Apr 05, 2018 08:55
From: Brian Baird
Subject: Network Slicing in 4G
Saad,
Oil & gas adopters of 4g / LTE for IIOT are doing a form of slicing with LTE using container based EPC deployments in combination with MNO APNs and private networks.
Let me know if you need more details on this.
Brian
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Brian Baird
Original Message:
Sent: Apr 04, 2018 02:06
From: Saad Ullah Sheikh
Subject: Network Slicing in 4G
Historically all of us have this notion that slicing is something come with 5G to support flexible resource monitor , provision and SLA compliance in 5G era but we want explore if some use case of using slicing in 4G , do any industry products supports it . If Yes what are use cases like APN based slice can get some example in 4G/4.5G if someone enabled it . Thanks!
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Saad Ullah Sheikh
Saudi Telecom Company
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