Extending network slice management to the end-host

The network slicing concept of 5G aims to provide the flexibility and scalability required to support a wide array of vertical services. To coordinate the coexistence of network slices, and to guarantee that the required resources are available for each one of them, the 5G core employs a slicing management entity, a slice manager. In this paper, we propose an architecture where the network slicing concept is extended beyond the core and access networks to also include the configuration of the UE's network stack. We exploit the slice manager's global view on the network to feed fine-grained information on slice configuration, health, and status to the UE. This information, together with local policies on the UE, is then used to dynamically create services tailored to the requirements of individual applications. We implement this architecture in a 5G testbed, and show how it can be leveraged in order to enable optimized services through dynamic network protocol configuration, application-to-slice mapping, and network protocol selection.