The Swedish vendor says it promises customised 5G services with guaranteed performance parameters.
Ericsson says its 5G RAN Slicing allocates radio resources at 1 millisecond (ms) scheduling and supports multi-dimensional service differentiation handling across slices.
It claims this strengthens end-to-end slicing for dynamic resource management and orchestration for diverse use cases.
Logical networks
Network slicing supports multiple logical networks for different service types over one common infrastructure.
Network slicing is one of the major 5G deployment models with potential application in transport, core network and orchestration for the consumer segment, enterprise and industry verticals.
Possible cases range from as video-assisted remote operations, AR/VR, TV and media for sports event streaming, cloud gaming, smart city, and applications for Industry 4.0 and public safety.
An Ericsson report estimates there is an addressable consumer market worth $712 billion (€587 billion) to service providers by 2030. The addressable market for network slicing alone in the enterprise segment is projected by the GSMA to be $300 billion (€247.3 billion) by 2025.
Diverse applications
As 5G scales up, service providers are looking to maximise returns on their investments by targeting innovative and high revenue-generating use cases such as cloud gaming, smart factories and smart healthcare.
Mark Düsener, Head of Mobile and Mass Market Communication at Swisscom, says: “We’re gearing up for the next stage of 5G where we expect to apply end-to-end network slicing, and RAN slicing is key to guaranteed performance.
“With efficient sharing of network resources across different slices, we will be able to provide communications for diverse 5G applications such as public safety or mobile private networks.”
Sue Rudd, Director, Networks and Service Platforms, Strategy Analytics, says, “Ericsson is the first vendor to offer a fully end-to-end solution with RAN slicing based on dynamic radio resource partitioning in under 1ms using embedded radio control mechanisms to assure quality of service, over the air, in real time.
“This truly end-to-end approach integrates radio optimisation with policy-controlled network orchestration to deliver inherently secure virtualised private RAN slicing without the loss of the 30–40% spectrum capacity due to ‘hard slicing’. Ericsson’s real-time dynamic RAN slicing bridges the ‘RAN gap’ to make e2e slicing profitable.”