The Creation Phase in Network Slicing: From a Service Order to an Operative Network Slice Ordoñez-Lucena, José Adamuz Hinojosa, Óscar Ramón Ameigeiras Gutiérrez, Pablo José Muñoz Luengo, Pablo Ramos Muñoz, Juan José Folgueira Chavarría, Jesús López, Diego Network Slicing SDN NFV Service Catalog Slice Instance Creation This work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (Project TEC2016-76795-C6-4-R), the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (FPU Grant 16/03354), and the University of Granada, Andalusian Regional Government and European Social Fund under Youth Employment Program.        —Network slicing is considered a key mechanism to serve the multitude of tenants (e.g. vertical industries) targeted by forthcoming 5G systems in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. In this paper, we present a SDN/NFV architecture with multitenancy support. This architecture enables a network slice provider to deploy network slice instances for multiple tenants on-the-fly, and simultaneously provision them with isolation guarantees. Following the Network Slice as-a-Service delivery model, a tenant may access a Service Catalog, selecting the slice that best fits its needs and ordering its deployment. This work provides a detailed view on the stages that a network slice provider must follow to deploy the ordered network slice instance, accommodating it into a multi-domain infrastructure, and putting it operative for tenant’s consumption. These stages address critical issues identified in the literature, including (i) the mapping from high-level service requirements to network functions and infrastructure requirements, (ii) the admission control, and (iii) the specific information a network slice descriptor should have. With the proposed architecture and the recommended set of stages, network slice providers can deploy (and later operate) slice instances with great agility, flexibility, and full automation. 2021-04-29T12:02:40Z 2021-04-29T12:02:40Z 2018-08 conference output J. Ordonez-Lucena et al., "The Creation Phase in Network Slicing: From a Service Order to an Operative Network Slice," 2018 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), 2018, pp. 1-36, doi: 10.1109/EuCNC.2018.8443255. http://hdl.handle.net/10481/68204 10.1109/EuCNC.2018.8443255 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ open access Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España IEEE