METIS: A Declarative Slice Orchestrator for Application-Centric 5G/6G Networks

A Capability Broker for Workflow-Network QoS Coordination in B5G/6G Industrial Services

Industrial services in beyond-fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) networks are increasingly executed as multi-phase workflows whose quality-of-service (QoS) demands change across ordered phases. Existing exposure, analytics, and policy-control functions can provide capability information and enforce QoS treatment, but they do not track the admitted QoS agreement between a workflow and the network. This paper studies this missing coordination function in the software control plane. We propose a Capability Broker that represents each admitted trajectory as a lifecycle-managed QoS commitment, including the workflow demand, network capability, validity time, and enforcement state. The Broker operates above existing exposure and policy-control interfaces and enforces capability freshness, duplicate-safe admission, legal state transitions, per-commitment event ordering, recovery routing, and Broker--network state consistency. Prototype results with microbenchmarks, fault injection, ablation, and controlled message loss show that the full Broker preserves commitment consistency with microsecond-level local processing overhead, while removing individual Broker functions exposes duplicate commitments, stale admissions, illegal transitions, lost-update divergences, or Broker-network inconsistency.

Orchra: Stateful-aware Cross-slice Workload Migrations in the 6G Control Plane

Network slicing is a foundational capability of Fifth Generation (5G)-Advanced and emerging Sixth Generation (6G) networks, yet practical support for seamless runtime slice transitions remains limited. Standard cloud-native 5G architectures lack native support for stateful inter/intra-slice session migration, relying instead on high-overhead Non-Access Stratum (NAS) re-registrations, container redeployment etc., which disrupt userplane traffic for up to 245.50 ms. To address this limitation, we present Orchra, an intelligent orchestrator for stateful, low-latency context transfer. By externalizing critical user equipment state-including NAS context, security keys, and Protocol Data Unit (PDU) session information-into a transient staging layer, Orchra preserves session continuity across slice boundaries without requiring full re-registration. Experimental evaluation shows that Orchra reduces this userplane interruption by more than twice in comparison to conventional Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)-based approaches while incurring negligible security overhead. These results demonstrate a practical and reproducible approach for enabling seamless, state-preserving slice transitions in cloud-native 5G-Advanced networks.

Programmable B5G Infrastructure for Vertical-Aware Slice Orchestration: Teleoperation in Dynamic 5G Environments

As 5G and Beyond networks increasingly expose programmable capabilities to vertical industries through standardized APIs such as CAMARA, new challenges emerge regarding efficient and reliable resource orchestration. In this paper we present a vertical-aware orchestration framework based on intelligent edge-deployed network applications that enable real-time coordination between vertical services and the 5G network. We introduce the Quality Awareness EdgeApp, a context-aware solution for dynamic per-UE QoS adaptation using exposed network APIs. The proposed framework is validated in a real-world 5G Standalone deployment at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges (Belgium) for teleoperated vessel operations. Our experimental results demonstrate improved SLA adherence and resource efficiency compared to static slicing and overprovisioning approaches. Our proposed architecture represents a practical step toward adaptive and scalable orchestration for 5G and Beyond vertical services.

CERLA-SFC: hierarchical orchestration of cost-efficient, reliable and low-latency SFCs in multi-access edge computing

Rule-Aware VNE for SDN Resource Management

Network Slicing Performance Analysis on an Open-Source-Based 5G Nomadic Node

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a network slicing implementation in a simulated 5G Standalone (SA) mobile network deployed as a nomadic edge node, where “nomadic” refers to the physical portability and ease of redeployment of a self-contained, containerized 5G testbed suitable for university teaching and experimentation. The platform integrates Open5GS, UERANSIM, Kamailio, and Prometheus/Grafana to emulate a sliced 5G core and access network supporting differentiated service requirements typical of heterogeneous traffic classes and latency-sensitive applications. Slice provisioning is fully configurable, and Docker-based resource constraints are applied to enforce Quality of Service (QoS) differentiation. Performance was assessed through bandwidth and traffic-quality measurements, demonstrating measurable improvements in packet loss and jitter for high-priority slices, with corresponding degradation for lower-priority slices. Although the laboratory environment limits replication of distributed real-world deployments, the results confirm the effectiveness of network slicing for traffic isolation and service prioritization in 5G SA systems. These findings highlight the practical boundaries of container-based slicing enforcement in a single-host nomadic 5G SA node, and inform the design of future multi-host deployments.