Summary

Managing the lifecycle of network slices has recently attracted much attention as well as constructing end-to-end network slices. Especially, the agility and flexibility in resource allocation to network slices becomes more important for rapid service delivery to network slice service customers in the International Mobile Telecommunications-2020 (IMT‑2020) network. Recommendation ITU-T Y.3154 describes scalable service management and orchestration framework using the middle layer named "resource pool", which intensively stores a variety of virtual resources information collected from the underlying infrastructure layer relevant to network slice instances (NSIs). NSIs can be created from the resources reserved according to a network slice service demand forecast. The proposed approach in Recommendation ITU-T Y.3154 is generic and thus applicable to a wide variety of organizational entities in network slicing, such as a network infrastructure provider, network slice provider, network slice service provider and network slice service customer.