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Top1. Introduction
Traditionally, connectivity operators have focused on voice, text messaging, and data services and have relied on adding more networking capacity to serve an increasing number of devices. The ongoing digitalization in industry verticals demands new and evolved use case specific services with vastly different connectivity requirements than before. Industry verticals consist of multiple tenants, with multiple use cases that have been served using multiple dedicated physical networks in the past, leading to economic and management overheads. With the advent of 5G and network virtualization, it is possible to deploy multiple network slices over the same physical network instead of deploying multiple dedicated physical networks.
Network slicing is enabled by network functions virtualization and software-defined networking, to create end-to-end virtual networks consisting of the required network function chains (3GPP, 2021b). These network functions can be deployed on off-the-shelf server hardware in dedicated or common virtualization infrastructures. With advancements in various industry verticals, 5G network slice provisioning must not only meet connectivity requirements but also provide specialized network and management exposure between business actors per slice.
The global market for network slicing is expected to reach 5.8 billion USD by 2025, and will be led by enterprise and industrial applications (Mind Commerce, 2020). While network slicing brings new opportunities for the telecommunication business it also requires the business actors to allocate, utilize, and manage network resources efficiently, flexibly, and cost-effectively. Novel business models are needed to be developed for network slicing in order to provide new services (Khan, Yaqoob, Tran, Han, & Hong, 2020). The new business models need to be applicable to existing customer segments and emerging industry verticals with multiple tenants. The support for multi-tenancy through a network slice broker, as a new actor has been studied by (Samdanis, Costa-Perez, & Sciancalepore, 2016). Network slice provisioning over multiple network domains has been studied in (Badmus, Matinmikko-Blue, Walia, & Taleb, 2019; Montero, Agraz, Pagès, & Spadaro, 2020). Further, operators can utilize different network slicing strategies for interworking between local and wide area networks (Walia, Hämmäinen, Kilkki, & Yrjölä, 2019). However, uncertainty exists over the distribution of business roles and interfaces between business actors and required business models.
The business actors involved in different use cases require different management exposure to request, configure, and manage their network slices. Further, different business interfaces can be enabled between the business actors to facilitate their respective policy and charging (3GPP, 2019). While network slicing is a key enabler, it requires both feasible technical architectures and business models. Telecommunication business needs re-engineering as the virtualized network resources can be provided with different management exposure between business actors, who can flexibly participate by applying alternative approaches for network slice provisioning. Thus, the main research aim of this article is to develop new business models for 5G network slice provisioning.
The main contributions of the article are as follows:
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Develops new business models for network slice provisioning.
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Compares the feasibility of the developed business models for different business actors.
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Maps the required slice types and business models to use cases.
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Compares the costs of dedicated and common virtualization infrastructures.
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Provides strategic approach and recommendations.