From Data Plane Programmability to Slicing Automation for Softwarized Infrastructures towards 6G (DataSlice 2023)

 Cloud native solutions have revolutionized the way network applications are developed and deployed over cloud computing infrastructure, with the increasing availability of edge computing sites and evolving traffic trends. As a result, investment in the development of highly distributed cloud-native applications, solutions, and cloud-native-first infrastructure is expected to increase over the next few years.

Telecom research and industry can leverage cloud-native solutions to improve scalability, reliability, flexibility, and other properties with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) blurring the lines between infrastructure and software. The digitization of network operations can help reduce operational costs and improve service agility, while the expansion of optical fiber infrastructure and smart society infrastructures can improve services and reduce costs. Overcoming the green challenge is critical for the planet and the sustainability of the network, and network-based sensing systems can include fiber cable digitization, distributed optical fiber sensing, and Wi-Fi sensing.

The current industry trend of convergence between computing and networking ecosystems highlights that computing, storage, and connectivity services will be deployed in the form of virtualized assets within software-defined infrastructures. This concept is summarized under the idea of a Slice, which has become a central piece in the evolution of telecom networks, yet the topic of Slicing is very much fragmented across conceptual views, approaches, technologies, standardization, and so on.

The DataSlice23 workshop aims to bring consolidation around slicing and discuss advances and challenges related to slicing in softwarized infrastructures towards 6G for faster and improved deployment of services in 5G and beyond environments. Furthermore, there is an increasing need for the realization of a compute continuum from IoT-to-Edge-to-Cloud, where network slicing will be at the forefront to support the deployment and operation of new services and applications across IoT devices, edge/core clouds, and initial conception of 6G architectures. This entails significant challenges for the unified management and orchestration of resources across different network segments together with edge and cloud infrastructures, potentially owned and managed by different operators.

There are many open questions to be addressed, including the fragmented landscape and gaps from concepts to standards towards multi-domain, end-to-end slicing, managing and controlling existing resource technologies, automatically defining and allocating end-to-end slices on-demand as a service, orchestrating and setting up cross-slice communication securely and optimizing interactions between services deployed in co-located slices, integrating novel approaches to facilitate the lifecycle management of slices on SDI, and learning from early slicing capabilities deployed for 5G systems while identifying operational gaps yet open.