Dynamic network slicing management of multimedia scenarios for future remote healthcare

ICT solutions must meet the requirements demanded by challenging and complex scenarios such as remote care, which can be viewed as a combination of heterogeneous services using multimedia and home-care tools. Network Slicing emerged to this end, a paradigm tailoring the needs of any scenario whose specifications need to be met at all times. For its implementation, the network flexibility and resource control features provided by the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) techniques can allow the Network Slicing paradigm to manage the peculiarities established by any given scenario, taking a special consideration to multimedia scenarios with particular needs such as low latency and high bandwidth. However, existing Network Slicing approaches lack management mechanisms to understand when resources and services have to be changed or reconfigured to continue meeting the requirements, what elements would be involved in this updating process, and how changes would have to be performed. This article addresses this challenge by proposing an architecture able to manage the complete life cycle of Network Slices and to determine when, what, and how to dynamically orchestrate the resources and services so as to meet the scenario requirements. This SDN/NFV-enabled architecture allows managing the underlying infrastructure at run-time through policies, which use a formal Network Slicing information model based on ontologies also proposed in this article. Also, a complete use case is exercised to face the specific requirements of a given eHealth scenario with multimedia services, whose feasibility is demonstrated through a number of conducted experiments.