As the founding members, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Digital Domain, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Huawei, CEPRI of SGCC, Tencent, TIM and Volkswagen AG announce the inauguration of the “5G Slicing Association”. The association will address requirements from vertical industry and the potential application scenarios of 5G network slicing on the way to defining new business models. The initiative will study key technical issues, cooperate with slicing related standards development organizations (SDOs) and foster test beds and trials to verify 5G network slicing capabilities.

5G networks will provide much higher speeds, lower latencies, and new levels of reliability and overall network performance and efficiency compared to previous generations. Importantly too, 5G can be an important tool for productivity and enabler for digital transformation in many vertical industries. With the rapid growth in application types, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, autonomous driving, smart factory, 5G networks must become smarter, more flexible and more tailored to vertical customers’ requirements.

As a key innovation in 5G technology, network slicing provides agile and customizable capabilities that allow the efficient construction of service guaranteed dedicated networks for different applications. By adapting the 5G network to different business needs, network slicing has the potential to open up new technological and business opportunities for both the ICT industry and other vertical industries. The members of this association will closely collaborate to realize the full potential together. The main activities of the association include:

• Development of an industry-wide, technical understanding for slicing

• Study and definition of slicing use cases for diverse industries and derive requirements

• Orchestrate E2E slicing SDOs and provide inputs to related standards

• Fostering of business-driven slicing test beds and trials

The 5G Network Slicing Association is a global association and welcomes more partners who are engaged in the action of digitalization of industries, including the ICT industry, vertical industry and even the broader eco-system and value chain. The 5G Network Slicing Association is closely working together with the GSMA Network Slicing Taskforce (NEST) which is prepared to bring the requirements into the standardization.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd