Life Cycle Management

A fundamental solution to managing slice instantiation, activation, runtime monitoring, updating, and deactivation. The process of LCM follows the following step. It starts with the slice instantiation phase, defining the slice requirements into policy catalogs/templates. Once the slice policy is defined, the slice creation phase starts to reserve the resources and requests the orchestrator to create the slice. After that, the slice instantiation process instantiates the slice components, and the activation process activates the slice and makes it available for use. At the activation phase, the network slice is working to keep the slice or service in a demanded state the monitoring system plays its role. The monitoring phase provides feedback to update the slice per the service demand. Once a slice has reached its life span, it must be deactivated in the deactivation phase. Hence LCM performs complete management and orchestration of network slice instances.