Dedicated wide area network slices
AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorRachee Singh
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Infrastructure comprising a wide area network (WAN) is adapted as a transport network portion of a 5G network in which the WAN is sliced at the optical layer on a discrete wavelength basis to provide dedicated network capacity to customers such as service providers, application providers, and network operators. Optical layer slicing extends the slicing construct for a radio access network (RAN) portion of the 5G network through to the WAN to provide end-to-end 5G network slicing from user equipment (UE) accessing an air interface of the network to application servers that are instantiated in data centers in a network cloud portion of the 5G network.
Claims20
A computer-implemented method for slicing a wide area network (WAN) that operates as at least a portion of a transport network of a 5G (fifth generation) network, the method comprising:
- supporting utilization of a plurality of WAN slices, each WAN slice being implemented to transport data traffic over commonly-shared optical fiber systems of the transport network according to on-demand requests for network capacity, in which the plurality of WAN slices are mappable to one or more pre-defined service-based slice types described by International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) recommendation M.2083-0;
- implementing a WAN slice controller that is operatively coupled to physical infrastructure underlying the transport network of the 5G network, the infrastructure comprising one or more wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical transport systems that traverse nodes of the WAN;
- selecting nodes on a WAN slice path including an entry node, a destination node, and zero or more intermediate nodes between the entry node and the destination node;
- using the WAN slice controller for dynamically carving out optical spectrum on the WAN for contiguous utilization across each of the nodes on the WAN slice path according to the on-demand requests;
- and
- provisioning the nodes of the WAN slice path to utilize the carved out optical spectrum for network traffic on the 5G network to instantiate a WAN slice extending from the entry node to the destination node, wherein the carved out spectrum is dedicated to the instantiated WAN slice.
A computing device, comprising:
- at least one processor;
- and
- at least one non-transitory computer-readable storage device having computer-executable instructions stored thereon which, when executed by the least one processor, cause the computing device to
- support utilization of a plurality of slices of a wide area network (WAN), each WAN slice being implemented to transport data traffic over commonly-shared optical fiber systems of a transport network of a 5G (fifth generation) network according to on-demand requests for network capacity, in which the plurality of WAN slices are mappable to one or more pre-defined service-based slice types described by International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) recommendation M.2083-0;
- implement a WAN slice controller that is operatively coupled to physical infrastructure underlying the transport network of the 5G network, the infrastructure comprising one or more wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical transport systems that traverse nodes of the WAN;
- select nodes on a WAN slice path including an entry node, a destination node, and zero or more intermediate nodes between the entry node and the destination node;
- use the WAN slice controller for dynamically carving out optical spectrum on the WAN for contiguous utilization across each of the nodes on the WAN slice path according to the on-demand requests;
- and
- provision the nodes of the WAN slice path to utilize the carved out optical spectrum for network traffic on the 5G network to instantiate a WAN slice extending from the entry node to the destination node, wherein the carved out spectrum is dedicated to the instantiated WAN slice.
One or more non-transitory computer-readable memory devices storing computer-executable instructions which, upon execution by one or more processors disposed in a computing device, cause the computing device to:
- support utilization of a plurality of slices of a wide area network (WAN), each WAN slice being implemented to transport data traffic over commonly-shared optical fiber systems of a transport network of a 5G (fifth generation) network according to on-demand requests for network capacity, in which the plurality of WAN slices are mappable to one or more pre-defined service-based slice types described by International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) recommendation M.2083-0;
- implement a WAN slice controller that is operatively coupled to physical infrastructure underlying the transport network of the 5G network, the infrastructure comprising one or more wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical transport systems that traverse nodes of the WAN;
- select nodes on a WAN slice path including an entry node, a destination node, and zero or more intermediate nodes between the entry node and the destination node;
- use the WAN slice controller for dynamically carving out optical spectrum on the WAN for contiguous utilization across each of the nodes on the WAN slice path according to the on-demand requests;
- and
- provision the nodes of the WAN slice path to utilize the carved out optical spectrum for network traffic on the 5G network to instantiate a WAN slice extending from the entry node to the destination node, wherein the carved out spectrum is dedicated to the instantiated WAN slice.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.