A Trust architecture for the SLA management in 5G networks

It is well established that 5G will impact not only the end-users by allowing several new services, but also the vertical industry and network operators business. 5G will open the business market to new stakeholders with the introduction of Network Slicing, namely the vertical or tenant, the network slice provider, and the infrastructure provider. The Network Slice provider sells end-to-end network slices (virtual end-to-end mobile network) to the vertical while leasing virtual and physical resources from Infrastructure Providers to enforce these end-to-end network slices. Accordingly, there is a need to establish Service Level Agreement (SLA) among these actors to ensure: (1) that the service is well-delivered to the vertical and (2) the infrastructure providers are respecting their involvement with the network slice provider. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a trust architecture to automatically manage the SLAs and apply penalties and compensations if the SLAs are not respected by one of the involved actors.