This is a postprint version of the following published document: Oliva, Antonio de la, et al. Xhaul: toward an integrated fronthaul/backhaul architecture in 5G networks.

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Over the last couple of years, industry operators' associations issued requirements towards an end-to-end management and orchestration plane for 5G networks. Consequently, standard organisations started their activities in this domain. This article provides an analysis and an architectural survey of these initiatives and of the main requirements, proposes descriptions for the key concepts of domain, resource and service slicing, end-to-end orchestration and a reference architecture for the end-to-end orchestration plane. Then, a set of currently available or under development domain orchestration frameworks are mapped to this reference architecture. These frameworks, meant to provide coordination and automated management of cloud and networking resources, network functions and services, fulfil multi-domain (i.e. multi-technology and multioperator) orchestration requirements, thus enabling the realisation of an end-to-end orchestration plane. Finally, based on the analysis of existing single-domain and multi-domain orchestration components and requirements, this paper presents a functional architecture for the end-to-end management and orchestration plane, paving the way to its full realisation.

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This article introduces the key innovations of the 5Growth service platform to empower verticals industries with an AI-driven automated 5G End-to-End (E2E) slicing solution which allows industries to achieve their service requirements. Specifically, we present multiple vertical pilots (Industry 4.0, Transportation and Energy), identify the key 5G requirements to enable them and analyze existing technical and functional gaps as compared to current solutions. Based on the identified gaps, we propose a set of innovations to address them with: (i) support of 3GPP-based RAN slices by introducing a RAN slicing model and providing automated RAN orchestration and control, (ii) an AI-driven closed-loop for automated service management with Service Level Agreement (SLA) assurance, and, (iii) Multi-domain solutions to expand service offerings by aggregating services and resources from different provider domains and also enable the integration of private 5G networks with public networks.

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This article discusses a novel approach for realizing traffic engineering in the framework of new-generation multilayer networks based on the GMPLS paradigm. In particular, the proposed traffic engineering system is able to dynamically react to traffic changes while at the same time fulfilling QoS requirements for different classes of service. The proposed solution consists of a hybrid routing approach, based on both offline and online methods, and a novel bandwidth management system that handles priority, preemption mechanisms, and traffic rerouting in order to concurrently accommodate the largest amount of traffic and fulfill QoS requirements. The bandwidth resources of the network are effectively exploited by means of "elastic" utilization of the bandwidth. The main building blocks and operations of the system are reported, and the major advantages are discussed.