Hierarchical identifier (HID)-based 5G architecture with backup slice

To support network slicing and service function chaining (SFC) at a time, we propose a novel hierarchical identifier (HID)-based 5G architecture. For this, we first introduce HID which consists of network slice selection assistance information (NSSAI) and service path ID (SPI). Based on HID, a user can attach a specific network slice and flows generated by the user can be processed by a set of service functions (SFs) in a sequence. Meanwhile, when the incoming flow to a specific slice unexpectedly increases, the slice cannot handle incoming flow due to its limited capacity, which degrades users' quality of service (QoS). To alleviate this issue and efficiently utilize network resources, we introduce a concept of the backup slice shared by different services. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture can achieve better performance in terms of the average system blocking probability and utilization in dynamic environments.