5G enables new business model innovation across all industries. Network slicing will play a crucial role in enabling service providers to offer innovative services to enter new markets and expand their business today. Network slicing has been shown to be a fundamental way of providing customized services and use cases for enterprises in multiple verticals with corresponding network requirements.

The device ecosystem has now started to develop support for multiple network slices on commercial smartphones.

Monica Zethzon, Head of Solution Area Packet Core at Ericsson says: “We are now enhancing the Ericsson 5G Core portfolio with new network slicing capabilities, by introducing Ericsson Dynamic Network Slice Selection. This enables our customers to provide differentiated 5G services to their enterprise and consumer customers, by enabling multiple tailored network slices on a single 5G device.”

The first steps have been taken to enable enterprise services in smartphones for high-quality connectivity, and support for consumer services in smartphones will follow, as well as support in other 5G devices.

Ericsson has been actively working with the device ecosystem to introduce 3GPP-standards based user equipment route selection policies (URSP) in 5G networks to enable application traffic steering with network slices.

URSP is one of the main functionalities being implemented in 5G smartphones and 5G network infrastructure and allows devices to have multiple network slices on the same device with traffic detection and steering capabilities.

Ericsson is now introducing new capabilities in the 5G Core portfolio, with the Ericsson Dynamic Network Slice Selection solution, which enables flexible separation of services and enhances traffic steering to maximize quality of experience on a single device. This brings benefits to enterprises by supporting optimal selection of slice security for enterprise devices, by enabling use of dedicated work profiles. The Ericsson capability is also key to effective edge compute deployments by allowing edge breakout of user plane for optimized network characteristics.

Users can benefit from differentiated services by having separate network slices for personal and work profiles. They could have one slice for generic mobile broadband traffic, another slice for a service like gaming, and one or several slices for work, like a high-security slice for enterprise applications like video conferencing and collaboration. Application developers could use this technology to improve the quality of experience for their applications, for example by decreasing the latency.
 

Andy Hicks, Principal Analyst at GlobalData says: “With its introduction of Dynamic Network Slice Selection, Ericsson extends the capabilities of its strong cloud-native 5G Core to the device OS. This is a significant step toward making network slices work in a real-world enterprise context, including segmentation by user profile.”

In November last year FarEasTone and Ericsson demonstrated the world’s first 5G end-to-end multiple network slicing on commercial Android 12 devices based on an Ericsson-powered 5G standalone system.

In January 2021 we launched 5G RAN Slicing that supports customized business models and growth requirements, strengthening end-to-end network slicing capabilities needed to deliver different services over a common infrastructure and ensuring end-to-end network slice management and orchestration support for fast service delivery.

The solution is an integral part of Ericsson’s end-to-end network slicing offering with BSS, OSS, Core, 5G RAN slicing and Transport domains and enables simplified introduction in CSP networks.