Abstract
The majority of businesses have primarily relied on one shared network for non-critical work, including conference calls, email,
online service portals, local office Wi-Fi, digital payments and other applications. However, as more devices require connectivity as
part of the Internet of things (IoT), businesses are exploring connectivity use cases that align with high availability and scalability,
charting the path to network slicing.
Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are gearing to adopt/ explore new business potentials through end-to-end network
slicing that will enable new and innovative use cases across all Industry verticals. From a business perspective, a slice can fulfil
a specific business case or deliver focused outcomes for using a combination of all the relevant network resources, functions and
other existing assets. When selecting target industry segments and corresponding use cases for CSPs, there are several things
to consider. First of all, there needs to be a solid enterprise strategy around industries or verticals to target and the local market
possibilities. With network slicing, CSPs can roll out services and support applications in quicker time to market mode, and this
helps them address industry-specific services around Railways, Healthcare, Emergency services, Airways and Smart cities, to
name a few. Slicing guarantees a certain level of QoS and allows service providers to configure the network to meet specific
security needs. As service content varies across end customers, slicing provides more effortless scalability and simplified network
management for enterprises. This paper captures the background, related work in network slicing, its benefits, delving into a few
use cases, significant security issues and also highlighting its commercial potential.
Keywords: 5G, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Network Slicing
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